.'•■..'■:•■■■■■•■ 

888818181 8 ggj 



I LIBRARY OF CONOR KSS. | 

I -m-y 7p 3 r I 

^ # 

^UiYited; states of ameuica.* 




: 



LESSONS 



FROM 



THE WORLD OF MATTER 



AND 



THE WORLD OF MAN. 

BY 

THEODORE PARKER. 



SELECTED FROM NOTES OF UNPUBLISHED 

SERMONS, 

BY RUFUS LEIGHTON. 



-vKvJafrJo-c 






BOSTON: 
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES W. SLACK 

186 5. 










Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, 

By RUFUS LEIGHTON, 

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



TO 

HANNAH ELIZABETH STEVENSON, 

FOR MANY YEARS THE MUCH-VALUED FRIEND OF 

AND CO-WORKER WITH HIM IN LETTERS AND IN ALL THE HUMANITIES, 

AND WHO NOW IN MANY GOOD WORKS, WITH THE STRENGTH AND 

EARNESTNESS OF MAN'S WILL, AND THE SWEETNESS 

AND SELF-DENIAL OF WOMAN'S DEVOTION, 

SANCTIFIES HIS MEMORY, 

AND ILLUSTRATES THE LOFTY VIRTUES WHICH HE DEMANDED IN HIS 

TEACHINGS AND EXEMPLIFIED IN HIS LIFE AND CHARACTER, 

IS DEDICATED THIS VOLUME 

OF SELECTIONS FROM HIS WORKS, 
WITH THE SINCEREST ADMIRATION, AND THE MOST AFFECTIONATE ESTEEM, 

BY HER FRIEND, 

RUFUS LEIGHTON. 



PREFACE. 



The last time that I saw Mr. Parker, just previous to. his 
leaving Boston for the West Indies, in the latter part of 
January, 1859, while he was making his final arrangements, 
not only for the immediate voyage, but with a view to the 
possibility of his never returning, I said to him that I should 
be glad to publish a volume of selections from my phono- 
graphic notes of his sermons, — taken down from Sunday to 
Sunday, as they were delivered during several years previous. 
He gave his cordial assent to the proposal, and afterwards 
alluded to it several times in his correspondence with me and 
with others, during the year that followed, while vainly seek- 
ing the restoration of his health in foreign lands. 

Shortly before I made this suggestion he had written to 
me thus : " It has been a great comfort to me often to think 
that after I have passed away some of my best things might 
still be collected from my rough notes and your nice photo- 
graph of the winged words. The things I value most are 
not always such as get printed." 

The book was commenced long since, but, from various 
considerations, its completion has been delayed until this 
time. Since whatever of truth or instruction it may contain 
is as applicable at this day as at any other, it is believed that 
this postponement has not impaired its value. 

The selections have been made from the sermons of ten 
years, extending from 1849 to 1859, and embrace a wide 
range of topics. A few of them have before appeared in 
print, having been copied out for the newspapers of the 
day, at the time of the delivery of the sermons; but as these 



VI PEEFACE. 

are worthy of preservation in a more permanent form, it is 
thought best to include them here. 

The aim has not been to produce a volume of brilliant and 
striking passages, such as might easily have been gathered 
from the materials at hand, nor to present in any comprehen- 
sive and connected manner the philosophical and religious 
opinions of Mr. Parker, which are given at length in works 
already before the public. The design has been rather to 
bring together, in a convenient form, some of the familiar 
lessons with which his sermons abound, drawn from the 
world of matter and from the nature and experience of man, 
from past history and from passing events, and useful as helps 
in the formation of character and the conduct of life. 

One of the most striking peculiarities of his preaching was 
his happy faculty of presenting the highest themes, however 
abstruse or complex in their nature, in such a manner as to 
render them attractive to the thousands, gathered from all 
walks and conditions of life, who so eagerly listened to him, 
and adapting them to every range of comprehension. 
Another was the continual and varied illustration of his fa- 
vorite idea that Religion, while the loftiest of all human con- 
cerns, is to be applied to every department of human thought 
and action, and to rule not only in the church, but in the 
state and the community, and in the daily life of each indi- 
vidual man ; — not the " popular theology " which has hith- 
erto prevailed, but the " absolute religion " of love to God 
and love to man, piety and morality, in their numberless 
modes of manifestation. 

These characteristics appear prominently in this volume, 
and it is believed will render it welcome to those who may 
have listened to the words which are here reproduced, as 
well as acceptable to others who aspire to what is good and 
noble, and rejoice in the truth fitly spoken. 

R. L. 

Washington, D.O., May 10, 1865. 



CONTENTS. 



THE MATERIAL WORLD AND MAN'S RELATION 

THERETO. 

PAGE. 

The Grandeur of the Natural World 15 

Law in the World of Matter 19 

Science Dependent upon Law in the World of Matter 20 

The Relation of Small Things to Great 22 

Mind in the World of Matter 22 

Power, Law, and Mind, in the Universe 24 

Divine Love in the Woiid of Matter 25 

The Effect of Material Circumstances on Animals 27 

Reserved Power 28 

The Abundance of Beauty in the World 33 

The Beauty of the World a Proof of God's Love 38 

The Adaptation of the World of Matter to the Wants of Man 40 

Man's Power over the World the Result of Work 41 

The Effect of Power in the Material World upon the Mind of Man 44 

The World of Matter as affecting the Imagination 47 

Spring 51 

THE NATURE OF MAN. 

The Grandeur and the Beauty of Man 66 

Man's Nature Greater than his History 68 

Human Nature Adequate to its End 69 

Man the Highest Product of Man's Work 70 

The Evil of putting a Low Estimate on Man 72 

The False Idea of Woman a Cause of Degradation 74 

Woman's Spiritual Transcendence 76 

Man's Spirit reported in his Physical Condition 76 

False Estimate of the Body..' 77 

The Beauty of Youth 77 

Old Age the Only Natural Death 78 

Weil-Born People 79 

Great Men 81 

Men of Talent and Men of Genius 87 

Man's Nature a Prophecy of Eternal Growth 100 

vii 



VIII CONTENTS. 

TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF HUMAN CHARAC- 
TER AND CONDUCT. 

The Importance of the Individual Man 102 

Character 108 

Human Welfare 109 

The Common Occupations of Life to be Honored 110 

Frivolity 112 

Earnestness 113 

Know-Nothings 114 

Lives of Pleasure 116 

The Quality of Pleasure 116 

Human Wrecks 117 

Retribution 117 

Temptation of the Devil 118 

Manhood Lost or Won in Material Pursuits 118 

Amos Lawrence 122 

Contrasts 126 

Material and Spiritual Riches 128 

Silent Witnesses 129 

The Modem Devil 129 

Courage 134 

Moral Courage 135 

Deference to Public Opinion 136 

Personal Integrity 137 

Personal Idealization 145 

The Happy Man 147 

Modesty a Characteristic of the Greatest Men 148 

Power of Feeling Essential to Greatness of Character 149 

Meanness and Genei-osity 155 

Christianity and Christian Formality 190 

Greatness and Goodness 192 

The Ideal and the Actual of Manly Character 193 

The Foundation of Self-respect 195 

To What End is our Life? 197 



PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 

The Duration of the Family 199 

Home 200 

Marriage 203 

Elegance does not make a Home , 205 

The Mother's Influence on the Child 206 

The Will to be Trained, not Broken 207 

111 Temper 207 



CONTENTS. IX 

Good Temper 20S 

Intemperance in the Family 208 

Virtue begins at Home 209 

Piety at Home 212 



EDUCATION. 

The Value of Education , 213 

Experiments 214 

Educational Value of Industry 214 

All Material and Spiritual Forces for Man's Benefit 217 

The Need of Higher Education 219 

Intellectual Culture 221 

Books 232 

The Power and Influence of Ideas 233 

The Use of Beauty 247 

The Elevating Influence of Beauty 248 

Moral Education 249 

Self-Ignorance 249 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

The Complete Organization of Society 251 

The Idea of a Real Church 252 

The Ideal and the Actual Church 255 

New Institutions require New Soil 259 

Man Proposes, and God Disposes 261 

National Progress 263 

The Highest Function of a Nation 264 

How to Estimate the Value of a Nation 264 

Sudden Wealth in a Nation not Favorable to Piety 265 



THE POWER AND ENDURANCE OF WHAT IS 
NOBLEST IN MAN. 

The Power of Thought 267 

The Power of Truth 270 

Only Truth and Justice will satisfy Man 272 

Integrity Wins 273 

The Joys of Conscience 275 

The Preponderance of Goodness in the World of Man 276 

Disinterested Philanthropy 287 

Philanthropy shall Prevail 288 

Great Benefactors Unrecognized 288 



X CONTENTS. 

No Good Thing Lost , 290 

All Excellence is Perpetual 293 

Good not Lost amidst the Bad 294 

Each Individual Excellence for Mankind's Benefit 295 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 

Man to make his own Paradise 296 

The False Idea of Man a Hinderance to his Progress 299 

Man's Progress not by Miracle, but by the Use of Natural Forces 300 

Power of the Human Will over Circumstances 305 

The Necessity for an Ideal 307 

Death a Blessing to Man 308 

The Founders of New England — the True Way to Honor them 309 

The Prophecy of the Past to the Future 311 

The Next Half-Century 313 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

The Character of Jesus 315 

The Jesus of Fact and the Christ of Fancy 324 

The Mission of Jesus 326 

The Strength of Jesus 332 

The Example of Jesus a Source of Strength 334 

The Integrity of Jesus 335 

The Goodness of Jesus a Prophecy of Future Good 336 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

The Infinite God 338 

Man's Idea of God 340 

Knowledge of God 341 

God Manifest in all his Works 342 

No Absolute Evil in God or his Works 342 

God's Law 344 

The Transient and the Eternal 345 

The Joy of Keeping God's Higher Law 347 

Recognition of God, and Trust in his Means 348 

Dependence upon God 360 

Man's Right to God's Providence 362 

God cares for Each and All 364 

Faith in God 365 

Love to God 366 

Harmony between Man and God 367 



CONTENTS. XI 

The False Idea of Inspiration 373 

The True Idea of Inspiration 377 

The Normal Development of the Eeligious Faculty 385 

Idealizing Forces 392 

The World as seen by the Light of Eeligion 393 

Revivals of Religion 398 

Superficial Religion 407 

Popular Preaching 408 

Themes Fit for Sunday's Preaching 411 

The Power of Religion 412 

The Great Peculiarity of Christianity 413 

Man's Future controlled by his Present 416 

Man's Eternity 418 

The Transcendent World 419 

Spiritual Riches 420 

Spiritual Assessment 421 

Toleration 422 

The Orthodox Heaven 423 

The Function of Pain 423 

The Sadness of Funerals 424 

Infidels 424 

Heroism of the Soul 425 

Compensation , ' 425 

Comfort in Religion 427 

The Highest Joy 429 



LESSONS 



FKOM 



THE WORLD OF MATTER 



AND 



THE WORLD OF MAN. 



" Skilful alike with tongue and pen, 
He preached to all men everywhere 
The Gospel of the Golden Rule, 
The New Commandment given to men, 
Thinking the deed, and not the creed, 
Would help us in our utmost need. 
With reverent feet the earth he trod, 
Nor banished Nature from his plan, 
But studied still with deep research 
To build the Universal Church, 
Lofty as is the love of God, 
And ample as the wants of man." 



Longfellow. 



THE MATERIAL WORLD 



AND 



MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 



THE GRANDEUR OP THE NATURAL WORLD. 

THE natural world which a man lives on and lives by 
— I mean the material world of nature all about us — 
is the same thing to all who live in the same latitude and 
place. And what a grand world it is ! I do not wonder 
that our old German heathen fathers, and so many other 
heathens, worshipped it. The ground under our feet is 
so firm-set and solid, the heavens over our head are so 
magnificent, the air about us is so bland when it is still, 
so powerful when it is stirred into stormy motion, — 
what a world it is ! All day long there are the light, the 
clouds, the trees, the waters, 



the winds, 



" Never weary of flowing 
Under the Sun/' 



Never weary of fleeting, 
Since Time has begun. 



All night long the good God shepherds the stars in the 
wide pasture of heaven ; He goeth before them, leadeth 
them out, calleth every star by name, and they know his 
voice, the motherly voice of the good Shepherd of the 

15 



16 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

universe, to whom each star is a little lamb, fed and 
folded by the infinite presence of Him 

"Who doth preserve the stars from wrong." 

This natural world is a glory and a delight, 

"A thing of beauty, and a joy forever." 

Men hard entreated with toil, or chasing after pleasure, 
after honor, after riches, after power, catch glimpses of 
it by stealth, as it were, as the ox at the plough reaches 
out from the yoke, and, hard-breathing, licks up a morsel 
of grass. So, many men see the world of nature, and 
get, now and then, a mouthful of beauty. We all get 
something of its use, for we not only live on it, as a 
foundation, but by it, as food and shelter. 

This natural world is " a cupboard of food and a cabi- 
net of pleasure," as an old poet quaintly puts it. All 
sorts of things are therein stored up for present or future 
use. On the lower shelves, which the savage man can 
reach to, there are the rudest things, — acorns, roots, nuts, 
berries, wild apples, fish, and flesh. Higher up there are 
corn, salt, wool, cotton, stones with fire to be beaten out 
of them by striking them together ; then live animals of 
various sorts ; next, metals, iron, copper, silver, gold, and 
the like, — all ready to spring into man's hand, and serve 
him, when he can reach up to them and take them down. 
A little further up there are things to adorn the body, — 
ochre to paint the cheeks, feathers to trim the head, 
rubies and diamonds, and many a twisted shell, still fur- 
ther to ornament and set off the world ; all sorts of finery 
for the Nootka Sound female and the Parisian woman. 
Still higher up are laid the winds to grind man's corn, 
waters to sift his meal ; and above these are coals wait- 
ing to become fire, and to be made the force of oxen, 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 17 

winds, rivers, and men. Yet higher up lie the gases 
which are to light a city, or take away the grief of a 
wound, and make a man invulnerable and invincible to 
pain. Higher still are things which no man has climbed 
up to and looked on as yet. There they lie, shelf rising 
above shelf, gallery above gallery, and the ceiling is far 
out of the telescopic sight of the farthest-sighted man. 
A short savage, like King Philip of Pokanoket, looks on 
the lower shelves and takes what he wants, — a club, a 
chip of stone, a handful of sea-shells, a deer-skin, a bit of 
flesh, a few ears of corn, — and is content with them, and 
thanks God for the world he lives in. But the civilized 
man who has grown as tall as Captain Ericsson reaches 
higher, and takes down cattle power, wind power, water 
power, steam power, lightning power, and hands them 
to the smaller boys, to us who have not yet grown up to 
reach so high. Some of the tallest-minded of the human 
tribe stand on tip-toe and look up as high as they can 
see, and then report to us the great machinery and astro- 
nomical wheel-work which keeps the sun and moon in 
their place ; or report of the smaller machinery, the nice 
chemical and electrical gearing which holds the atoms of 
a pebble together, and whereby the great world grows 
grass for oxen and corn for men. This is as high as any 
mortal man has got as yet ; and it is a great way to climb 
from the acorn on the bottom shelf up to the celestial 
mechanics on the upper shelf, which Newton and La 
Place are only tall enough to look over and handle. 

Such is the natural world that we live on and by. It 
is the home of us all, and the dear God is the great house- 
keeper and the ever-present mother therein. He lights 
the fires every morning, and puts them out every night ; 
yea, hangs up the lamps, and makes it all snug for the 
family to sleep in, beneath his motherly watchfulness, all 



18 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

night long, till the morning fire awakes again, and, glitter- 
ing along the east, shines into his children's brightening 
eyes. 

This world of nature is meant for all. The sun shines 
on the evil and the good, and the rain rains on the just 
and the unjust. The same ground is under General 
Pierce and his pig, and the same heavens are over the 
astronomer and his dog ; and dog and astronomer, pig 
and president, all live on, live under, live in the same 
natural world, and the All-Bountiful is father and mother 
to them all, not over-honoring the astronomer, not un- 
dervaluing the dog or the swine. And yet what a very 
different world it is to pig and president, to dog and as- 
tronomer ! To such as look only at the lower shelves it 
is a dull, hard, prosy world. To those who reach up to 
fashion and finery, to the nicknacks of nature, it is a 
dainty show of pretty things, a sort of great Vanity Fair, 
where Mrs. Jezebel and Mr. Absalom are to adorn and 
make themselves comely. To others — who see the great 
uses in the power of things, the great loveliness in the 
beauty of things, the great wisdom in the meaning of 
things — it is a serious world, very serious ; but a lovely 
world, very lovely ; and a divine world, very divine ; full 
of God's power, God's wisdom, God's justice, God's 
beauty, and God's love, running out into the blossoms of 
the ground and the blossoms of the sky ; the whole uni- 
verse a great manifold flower of God, who holds it in his 
own right hand. 

It always seemed to me that this material world proph- 
esied something a great many times greater and grander 
than the highest man had yet seen or told of. I do not 
believe that God made this grand world of nature as the 
background to a little dwarfish picture of spirit. The 
great power of nature, the great beauty of nature, and its 



AND MAN'S EELATION THERETO. 19 

great sense, are all prophetic of a power, beauty, and 
sense which matter knows not of, which it will take great 
men and great generations of great men to fulfil and ac- 
complish. But it will one day be. It will take place in 
the golden ages, which are not behind us, but before us, 
and which are to be reached by your toil, and your prayer, 
and your thought, and sweat, and watching. I love to 
read the prophecy which God himself has writ. in the 
world of nature. Every piece of coal, every bit of iron, 
— why, it was a prophecy of steam-engines and steam- 
ships, if men had only the wit to read the oracle ! And 
so this natural world, with its powers, its beauty, its mean- 
ing, — why, it is a prophecy of a great human world that 
is to come, whereof the Isaiahs, the Socrateses, the 
Jesuses, and the Newtons, were only the prophets who 
foretold the beginning of the golden ages that are to 
come. 



LAW IN THE WORLD OF MATTER. 

In the universe, all is done according to law, by the 
regular and orderly action of the forces thereof; there 
is a constant mode of operation, which never changes. 
Nothing is done by human magic, nothing by divine 
miracle. Religious poets tell us that God said in Hebrew 
speech, " Let the earth be ! " and it was forthwith. " Let 
the waters bring forth fish, the air fowls, and the earth 
cattle ! " — and it was clone. But when you consult the 
record of the earth itself, you find that the six days mira- 
cle of the poet are millions of years work of the divine 
forces of the universe. These forces are always adequate 
to achieve their divine purpose, with no miraculous help, 
no intervention, no new creation of forces ; and in that 



20 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

immense book of space, whose leaves date back through 
such vast periods of time, there is not a single miracle 
recorded ; not once does it appear that God intervened 
and changed the normal action of any single thing. 



One star differs from another star in glory — not at all 
in the perfect keeping of every law of its existence as a 
star. 



SCIENCE DEPENDENT UPON LAW IN THE WORLD OF MATTER. 

The law of the world of matter is knowable by man, 
and when his thought comprehends that, the world of 
matter is manageable by his toil, and he can use its forces 
to serve his end. This power of science depends not 
only on the mind itself, but on the nice relation between 
that and the world of matter outside. What if this world 
of matter were — as the ministers oftentimes tell us it is 
— a bundle of incoherent things, no constant law in force 
therein, God intervening by capricious miracle, to turn 
a stick into a snake, water to blood, dust to flies and 
creeping things, mud to frogs, and ashes to a plague on 
beasts and men ; what if he sent miraculous darkness 
which could be felt, to revenge him on some handful of 
wicked men ; what if by miracle he opened the sea and 
let a nation through, and then poured the waters back 
on the advancing foe ; what if the rocks became water, 
and the heavens rained bread for forty years ; what if the 
sun and moon stood still and let a filibustering troop de- 
stroy their foe ; what if iron swam at some man's com- 
mand ; what if a whale engulfed a disobedient prophet 
who fled from God's higher law, and kept him three days 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 21 

shut up, till he made a great poetic psalm ; what if a son 
were born with no human father, and could by miracle 
walk on the waves as on dry land, feed five thousand men 
with five little barley loaves, and have in reserve twelve 
baskets-full of broken bread ; what if he could still the 
winds and the waters with a word, rebuke disease, re- 
store the lame and the blind at a touch, and wake the 
dead with " Lazarus, come forth ! " Why ! science would 
not be possible ; there would be nothing but stupid won- 
der and amazement, and instead of the grand spectacle of 
a universe, with law everywhere, thought waking reason 
everywhere, and stirring Newton to write the Principia 
of Natural Science, Linneeus to describe the systems of 
plants, La Place to cipher out the mechanics of the sky, 
Kant to unfold the metaphysics of man and the philoso- 
phy of human history, and the masterly intellect of Cuvier 
to classify the animal kingdom, — mankind thereby grow- 
ing wiser, and still more powerful, — we should have a 
priest's world of capricious chaos, some prophet going up 
to heaven on his own garment, some witch careering on 
a broom, and man vulgarly staring, as in a farmer's yard 
a calf stands gaping at some new barn-door. What is the 
world of monkish legend, the world of the Arabian Nights' 
Entertainments, the world of the Catholic Church, the 
world of the Calvinistic Church, or of the popular theol- 
ogy of our times, compared with the grand world which 
God has made it, — stars millions of millions of miles 
away looking down on these flowers at my side, and all 
the way between, law, order, never once a miracle, and 
all this so wondrously and tenderly related to man's 
mind ! 



22 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

THE RELATION OF SMALL THINGS TO GREAT. 

Look at this clothed congregation, and see whence all 
this vast array of handsome dress has been gathered up ! 
Part of it came from the backs of fur-clad beasts, which 
only polar cold can bear ; the linen grew up from the 
cool temperate soil ; tropic heat furnished the cotton ; 
the little silkworm has spun the substance of appropriate 
trees, which change their leaves to covering for the 
Adams and Eves of civilization. Various colors, which 
more than imitate the rainbow, have been gathered from 
the vegetable, animal, and mineral worlds ; — and all these 
depend, directly, on the structural character of the globe 
itself. As the rainbow is the child of the sun and cloud, 
nursed by lightning, waited on by gravitation, and girted 
into handsome shape by the spheric globe itself, so yon- 
der bonnet, the triumph of the milliner's art and the 
wearer's taste, is daughter of vegetation and animation, 
grand-child of the mineral world, which dowers it with 
such handsome hues, and in strict geologic descent, 
traces its aristocratic lineage back to the earth's attrac- 
tional orbit, and the constitution of the solar system. A 
little change in that far-off ancestry, and there could not 
be a bonnet in Boston to-day, more than a woman to wear 
it, or a young man to look delighted thereon. 



MIND IN THE WORLD OF MATTER. 

We perceive everywhere proofs of Intelligence in the 
world of matter, — a something which knows and wills. 
It is not brute force, acting without knowledge and will, 
but an intelligent power, working by means well under- 



AND man's eelation theketo. 23 

stood, continually directed to certain ends, which were 
meant to take place. 

This intelligence let us call by the name of Mind, — a 
power which knows without process of thought, wills 
without hesitation and choice ; not mind with human 
limitations, but absolute. 

The evidences of this mind are to be seen on every 
hand; on a large scale, in the structural plan of the 
whole solar system, — for every orb moves forever in its 
calculated track, which is shaped by the joint action of 
the sun and every planet, all of which act constantly 
by their law of motion ; seen also in the structure of the 
earth, in its complicated form, in the arrangement of its 
great divisions of matter into air, water, land, and in the 
special composition of each of these, and the fitness of 
each for its special function. And on a small scale, you 
see the same power of mind in the formation of crystals, 
the growth of plants, and the insects which live thereon. 

Study the leaf of an orange-tree : what wisdom is dis- 
played in its structure ; how admirable its architecture, 
what nice frame-work, what exquisite finish ; how intel- 
ligibly are the elements combined in its chemistry ; how 
the power of vegetation assimilates the particles of earth, 
air, water, whereby it grows into a plant ! What a func- 
tion the leaf has to perform, ■ — this little mason, building 
up the stem of the tree, and getting ready the substance 
of its flower and fruit ! See the apparatus by which the 
plant- breathes and gets its food ! No city government 
can get a steam-engine to pump water with such econ- 
omy as this little Miles Greenwood uses to keep itself 
always fired up, and ready for action. 

Look at the aphis which has its world on this little 
leaf! See with what intelligence the same mind has 
fashioned this minute creature ; what organs he has to 



24 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

satisfy his individual wants ; what power to perpetuate 
his race, wherewith he takes hold on eternitv, forward 
and backward. Behind him he has a line of ancestors 
reaching beyond Noah, Methuselah, and Adam. Study 
his internal structure ; how wonderful the means which 
conspire to form his insect life ! No municipal govern- 
ment is carried on with such wisdom. How admirable 
must be that constitution which gives unity of action to 
all his members, — all working as one, — and secures 
variety of action to each, individual freedom for each 
special member ! It is so everywhere in the world of 
matter. 

Now turn over that great volume wherein for many 
million years the Daily Journal and Evening Transcript 
of the world appear, each leaf bound in stone ; study 
through this Old Testament of ages past, and in every 
page, in every line, in each letter, do you find the same 
mind, power of knowledge and will, and that power is 
constant in all time which this great earthen book keeps 
record of, and it is continuous in all space whereof 
its annals tell. The more comprehensively things are 
studied on a great scale, the more vast this mind appears, 
in its far-reaching scope of time and space. The more 
minutely things are inquired after on a small scale, the 
more delicate appears this mind in its action. The solar 
system is not too big for it to grasp and hold, nor the 
eye of an aphis too small for it to finish off and provide 
for. 



POWER, LAW, AND' MIND, IN THE UNIVERSE. 

The whole universe of matter is a great mundane 
psalm to celebrate the reign of Power, Law, Mind. Fly 
through the solar system from remotest Neptune to the 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 25 

sun, — power, law, mind, attend your every step. Study 
each planet, it is still the same, — power, law, mind. 
Ask every little orange leaf, ask the aphis that feeds 
thereon, ask the insect corpses lying by millions in the 
dead ashes of the farmer's peat-fire, the remains of mol- 
lusks which gave up the ghost millions of years before 
man trod the globe, — they all, with united voice, answer 
still the same, — power, law, mind. In all the space 
from Neptune to the sun, in all the time from the sili- 
cious shell to the orange leaf of to-day, there is no fail- 
ure of that power, no break of that law, no cessation 
in its constant mode of operation, no single error of that 
mind, whereof all space is here, all time is now. So the 
world is witness continually to power, to never-failing 
law, to mind that is everywhere ; is witness to that ever- 
present Power which men call God. Look up, and rev- 
erence ; bow down, and trust ! 



Ever}^ rose is an autograph from the hand of the Al- 
mighty God. On this world about us he has inscribed 
his thought, in those marvellous hieroglyphs which 
sense and science have been these many thousand years 
seeking to understand. The universe itself is a great 
autograph of the Almighty. 



DIVINE LOVE IN THE WORLD OF MATTER. 

The average age of this audience is perhaps some 
forty years ; perhaps the human race has been on the 
earth a thousand times as long. Well, forty thousand 
years is not so large a proportion of this earth's existence 
as my hour's sermon is of mankind's existence ; but, as 



26 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

Sirius is far from the earth in space, so far from you and 
me in time is the beginning of the material history of 
the earth, which the geologist finds written in the sacred 
codex of the world, — the Old Testament of God, written 
by him in tables of real stone. Yet in that far time, 
many millions of millions of years away, was Mind con- 
trolling the power of matter by a constant mode of oper- 
ation, to this end, — to man, — and his relation to matter 
was provided then. The size and shape of the earth 
and its attractional orbit were then fixed ; the time of 
day and night ; the constitution of the air, which lets the 
solar heat and light come in ; the provision for food, shel- 
ter, medicine, and tools ; — all so fixed that they were 
sure to come, each in its proper time, — the stone first 
for the wild man, and for the enlightened the electric 
telegraph which runs beneath the sea. 

In all that space and time there is no cessation of 
power, law, mind, whereof Earth's records tell ; God 
immanent always, not once withdrawn. And in that 
mighty space, that immense of time, there is not the 
record of a single miracle or departure from law. God, 
ever present, never intervenes ; acting ever by law, a 
miracle becomes needless, and also impossible. Look at 
all this in its vast greatness in time and space, then 
consider the delicacy of that Providence, and see how 
nicely the eye is fitted to light ; and consider this 
mighty space and this immense time are so with deli- 
cacy filled up ; and then if it is power, law, mind, which 
moves our astonishment at first, the deeper second 
thought is the love which animates that mind to use 
that power, and by that law achieve the dear blessing 
which the motive of God at first desired, — the blessing 
for you and me, and every living thing. Forego that 
transcendent truth of the perfection of the relation of 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 27 

matter and man which I deduce from the idea of God as 
infinite perfection, and the very fact of that relation 
leads us to infer, not only power, law, mind, but that 
dear love which sends the sun so sweetly round the 
world, — 

" From seeming evil still educing good, 
And better thence again, and better still, 
In infinite progression. " 



THE EFFECT OF MATERIAL CIRCUMSTANCES ON ANIMALS. 

See the effect of material circumstances on animals. 
In the spring, warm weather brings out the flies, gnats, 
and swarms of other insects ; and they will multiply just 
in proportion to the geniality of the weather and the 
supply of their food. More requires more, and less 
requires less ; and the multiplication of insect life is 
exactly in proportion to the means of its support. With 
the increase of insects there will come an increase of 
the purple martin, the swallow, and other birds that 
feed thereon. Let a cold summer kill the insects, and 
the martins will disappear. Napoleon Bonaparte multi- 
plied beasts of prey and birds of rapine. They fed on 
the wreck of armies that went to pieces under his hand ; 
and Napoleon Bonaparte was the great father of wolves 
and vultures, because he furnished the material condi- 
tions which gave them birth, as much as if he had sat on 
the vulture's nest, and brooded her eggs with his own 
selfish bosom. 



28 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

RESERVED POWER. 

Everywhere in the world there is an exhibition of 
power, force active to-day. Everywhere, likewise, there 
is a reserve of power, force waiting for to-morrow. 
Force is potent everywhere, but latent as well. All 
men see the active power, all do not see the power which 
waits till it comes of age to do its work. 

In order to get the general analogy of the universe to 
bear upon this particular matter in hand, the power of 
progressive development in the human race, look at the 
plainest examples of this reserved power in nature. All 
around us the fields lie sleeping under their coverlet of 
frost. Only the mosses, the lichens, and other cryptog- 
amy have any green and growing life. Every hide-bound 
tree has taken in sail, and sent down its topmast, housed 
the rigging, and lies stripped there in bay, waiting for 
navigation to open in March and April. Even the well- 
clad bear has coiled himself up for his hybernating sleep 
all winter long ; the frogs and snakes and toads have hid 
their heads ; the swarms of insects all are still. Nature 
has put her little ones to bed. 

" Hush, my babe ! lie still and slumber ! 
Holy angels guard thy bed, 
Heavenly blessings without number 
Rest upon thy infant head ! " 

This is the evening cradle-song wherewith Nature lulls 
the reptile, insect, bear, and tree, to their winter sleep. 

Look at the scene next June. What life in the ground, 
in the trees spreading their sails to every wind, in the 
reptiles, in the insects ! Nature wakens her little ones 
in the new morning, and sends them out to the world's 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 29 

great vineyard to bear the burthen in the heat of the 
day, sure of their penny at its end. 

"What a reserve of power lies in the ground under our 
feet, in the silent throat of every bird, in the scale-clad 
buds on oak and apple-tree ! What energy sleeps in that 
hybernating bear, who in spring will come out from his 
hole in the Green Mountains, and woo his shaggy mate, 
and ere long rejoice in the parental joys of home, 

" His wee bit ingle blinkin' bonnily, 
His clean hearth-stane, his thriftie wifie's smile." 

A few years ago men brought from Egypt to Tuscany 
some grains of wheat which a farmer had laid up thirty- 
five or forty hundred years ago. They put it in the 
ground in Italy, and the power which those little grains 
had kept so long waked up bright, and grew wheat 
there, just as if nothing had happened since Sesostris 
marched his Egyptians, and set up pillars and temples 
from Asia Minor to the Indus, which Herodotus saw two- 
and-twenty hundred years ago. All the coffee plants in 
America, it is said, have come from two little trees which 
a Dominican priest brought here from Spain ; and when 
the ship was on short allowance for water, he divided his 
pint a day, taking a half-pint for himself, and sparing a 
gill for each of his trees ; and so they lasted, and were 
planted in Saint Domingo, and now they are spread all 
over the tropic continent. 

Three hundred years ago New-England was a wilder- 
ness, with wild beasts howling in the forests, and thirty 
thousand lazy, half-naked Indians howling wilder than 
the beasts. Idle rivers ran idly to an idle sea, flapping 
to the moon's attraction, as restless and as lazy as a sum- 
mer cloud. Then New-England was shaggy with awful 
woods, the only garment of the savage land. In April 



30 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

the windflower came out, and the next month the maple 
saw his red beauties reflected in the Connecticut and 
the Merrimac. In June the water-lily opened her fra- 
grant bosom. Who saw it? Only here and there some 
young squaw, thinking of her dusky lover, turned to 
look at its beauty, or the long-lipped moose came down 
in the morning and licked up its fragrance from the 
, river's breast ; and otherwise the maple bloomed and 
blushed unseen, and the lily wasted its sweetness on the 
desert air. 

Now civil-suited New-England has gardens, orchards, 
fields, is nicely girded with earthen and iron roads, and 
jewelled all over with cities and fair towns. The shaggy 
wood has been trimmed away, and is only 

" A scarf about her decent shoulders thrown." 

Three millions of men are snugly cradled in New-Eng- 
land's lap. The winds have been put to work. The 
ground, so lazy once, has no Sunday but the winter now. 
The rivers have been put out to apprentice, and become 
blacksmiths, paper-makers, spinners, and weavers. The 
ocean is a constant ferryman, always at work, fetching 
and carrying between the corners of the world. Even 
the lightning has been called in from his play-ground, 
and set to work ; he must keep the side-walk now when 
he travels, for we regulate the police of the sky j Dr. 
Franklin began that work. The lightning must no longer 
burn up meeting-houses, — a favorite errand which the 
devil used to send him on of old time, as Cotton Mather 
said, — he must keep the peace now; swift-footed, he 
must run of errands for the family. We say " Go ! " and 
the lightning has gone ; " Come ! " and the lightning is 
at our hand ; " Do this ! " and the lightning sets about it. 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 31 

Now the difference between the New-England of three 
hundred years ago and the New-England of to-day, was 
all a reserved power once. The Merrimac was the same 
river to the Indian that it is now to the American ; the 
ground and sky were the same; the earth does not 
secrete a different form of lightning from that which of 
old crinkled through the sky, uttering its thunder as it 
went. 

The change in the human race from the beginning till 
now is immensely greater than the change from the 
Massachusetts of red Governor Massasoit to the Massa- 
chusetts of pale Governor Clifford. All the difference 
between the first generation of men on earth — without 
house or garment, without wife or speech, without con- 
sciousness of God or consciousness of self — and the 
most cultivated society of religious men of England and 
America, was once a power of progress which lay there 
in human nature. The savage bore within him the germ 
of Michael Angelo, of La Place, and Moses, and Jesus. 
The capability of the nineteenth century lay in the first 
generation of men, as the New-England of to-day lay in 
the New-England of three hundred years ago, or as the 
wheat of the Tuscan harvest lay in those few Egyptian 
grains ; it lay there in the human faculties, asleep, 
unseen, and unfelt, with the instinct of progressive 
development belonging thereto. All the mighty growth 
of the Pagan civilization, of the Hebrew, the Buddhistic, 
the Mahometan, and the Christian, lay there unseen in 
man. A thousand years ago, who would have dared to 
prophesy the industrial civilization of New-England to- 
day ? When Sir Francis Drake scoured the seas, cap- 
turing every vessel that he could overmaster, great 
pirate that he was, murdering the crews of Spanish 
galleons, and burning them at sea after he had taken the 



32 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

silver, when he landed on the coast of Peru and Chili, 
and violated the women, and butchered the men, and 
burned the towns, leaving blackness and desolation 
behind him, and doing it for sport's sake, — who would 
have dared to prophesy the peaceful commerce which, 
under the two-fold Anglo-Saxon flag of England and 
America, now covers the ocean with the white blossom ' 
of the peace of the nineteenth century ? Nobody would 
have dared to prophesy this in the days of Sir Francis 
Drake. 

But, is this progress to stop here ? Have the average 
nations reached the capacity of mankind? Have the 
most enlightened nations exhausted the capacity for 
human improvement ? Has the foremost man of all the 
world drank dry the cup of humanity ? Newton, Hum- 
boldt, Moses, Jesus, — they have only scooped out and 
drank a handful of water from the well which opens into 
that vast ocean of faculties which God created, the 
mighty deep of human nature. 

How has the civilization of the world thus far been 
achieved? By the great men coming together, a thou- 
sand years ago, and. saying, " Let us advance mankind " ? 
The great men were not great enough for that. It has 
taken place in the providence of God, who, from perfect 
motives, of perfect material, for a perfect purpose, as 
perfect means, created this human nature, put into it this 
reserve of power, put about it this reserve of material 
elements, wherewith to make a Jacob's ladder to clamber 
continually upwards toward God, our prayer being the 
hand which reaches up, while our practice is the foot 
which sustains the weight which the prayer steadies. 
There is no end to this power of progressive develop- 
ment in man, at least none that you and I can discover. 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 33 

THE ABUNDANCE OF BEAUTY IN THE WORLD. 

One of the most remarkable things in the world is the 
abundance of beauty ; of what not only feeds, clothes, 
and outwardly serves the material needs of man, but also 
pleases the sense and soul, feeding and comforting the 
finer and nicer faculties of man. By the instinct of self- 
preservation we cling, all of us, to the material side of 
nature, and are thereby fed and nestled and warmed in 
body ; but while doing this we catch sight of nature's 
beauty also, and are contented in a higher sort, nestled 
yet more tenderly. As the hungry Jews, in the Old 
Testament story, went to bed grumbling, and rose the 
next morning not knowing how or whence to break their 
fast, and behold, there lay the manna, clean as new frost 
on the ground, saying as plain as food could say, " Come 
now, ye unbelievers, eat and be fed ! w so this angels' 
bread of beauty, which, " like manna, hath the taste of 
all in it," lies on the ground under our feet ; it lodges on 
the bushes in the country, clings to the city walls, and 
is always falling from the sky. God, after setting before 
us what we turn into bread, and garments, and houses, 
and musical instruments, and books, gives us the bene- 
diction of beauty as an unexpected grace after meat. 

The commonest things in the world are adorned, not 
with ornaments which are put on, but with beauty which 
grows out of their substance, which affects their form 
and shines through every lineament. The grass which 
springs up in the cracks of city streets, or which in 
meadows the farmer's ox licks up by handfuls, the 
delight of the cattle, who twice enjoy their food, — what 
a beautiful thing it is in shape, in color how exceeding 
fair ! How attractive to the eyes are the grains, from 
the bearded bread of horses, which loves the northern 



34 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

lands, to that queen of cereal plants, southern born, and 
loving still the sun, the Pocahontas of grains, the great 
Indian Empress of Corn ! The roots which the beasts 
and which men feed upon, — what homely and yet what 
comely things they are ; nay, the commonest of them all 
has in its homely shape a certain rather hard but mascu- 
line beauty and attractiveness. I cannot see them lying 
in heaps in the farmers' fields, or in waggon loads brought 
to market, the earth still clinging to their sides, without 
reverence for that infinite wisdom which puts such 
beauty into such common things. How handsome are 
the shapes of the apple, pear, peach, quince, plum ; of 
the acorn, the nut, the pine cone, yea, of every leaf, from 
the northern melon and thistle, down to the proud palm 
which claps its hands beneath the tropics to its Maker's 
praise ! How fair are all the seeds — those which plump 
down into the ground, or which tangle themselves in the 
feathers of birds or the hair of oxen, and so are carried 
from place to place, or those which in their gossamer 
balloons and parachutes float far off in every breath of 
wind, scattering the parent beauty to spring up in fra- 
grant loveliness for ever fresh and for ever new. 

Even homely things have a certain beauty in their 
use. Says one of the greatest of this day's later proph- 
ets, " Despise not the rag which man makes into paper, 
nor the litter which the earth makes into corn." When 
you look at the uses of things, and see the relation even 
of the homeliest and ugliest of these to the world about 
you, there is a certain beauty investing even things which 
are most unattractive to the mortal eye. So at even- 
ing have I seen a veil of silver spread itself over some 
little, drowsy, vulgar New-England town, coming up just 
to the roofs of the houses, leaving the village steeples 
and chimney-tops above that cloud, and the dull town 



AND MAN'S EELATION THERETO. 35 

looked exceedingly romantic ; and by-and-by the waning 
moon came up, and, with a star or two beside her, rode 
through the blue above, and looked clown and enchanted 
into loveliness the vulgar town. Beneath that silver 
veil tired nature slept, and men and women were trans- 
figured with their dreams. 

Even in the city, in the commonest street, if it is only 
a little lonesome, small plants find board and lodging in 
the chinky stones, and lift their thin faces, and seem to 
wish good morning to the rapid-stirring man or maid who 
knows these little apostles and botanic Ministers at Large, 
who are meant to evangelize the world, and are without 
staff or scrip, and who never chide the unthankful pas- 
senger. The fuci which float on the still waters, and 
fringe the timbers of the wharves, are lovely and attrac- 
tive things ; and yet they are so little noticed that they 
have not yet got the welcome of an English name, and I 
must talk Latin when I praise these humble things. The 
waters themselves, parting and breaking into lovely 
forms before the reeking pink of some Marblehead or 
Cape Cod fisherman, and closing again behind it in foam- 
ing beauty, mark the sea with lovely lines of sparkling 
light, by night or day. The prostrate timbers, chafing 
with the tide, rising and falling, decay into ornaments. 
Hateful things are transformed into animated beauty, and 
the bird that falls dead by the wood-side or the water- 
side, in a few weeks is transformed into flies, every one 
burnished with loveliness, a buzzing and animated rain- 
bow in God's morning sun. In the material world there 
is no such thing as death, only change, as day and night 
change to night and day again. Time tinges the scarred 
mountain-side with beauty, and paints every rock that 
the ocean leans against with exquisite colors that charm 
the eye. On the houses of the city in a fair day, and on 



36 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

the forms of men and beasts, and all the moving panorama 
of the street, there falls a light with beautiful effect, 
which offers to the hurrying passenger a spectacle of 
loveliness which varies all the day and educates the mor- 
tal eye, and still more, teaches what sits behind the eye 
and looks thence on the world, filling the mind with cheap 
and tranquil beauty. Even in the town Nature's beauty 
never fails, and to her favorites she sings for ever as she 
flies, by night or day. 

- At night, how pleasantly comes on the heavenly spring, 
and the celestial flowers begin to blossom. First come 
those larger and more hardy, which put out their loveli- 
ness and fringe the day, so that you would not know at 
first if they were the autumnal blossoms of the day or the 
spring blossoms of the night. Then the more delicate 
posies of the sky come out, timid, trembling with loveli- 
ness, and ere long the heavens celebrate a White Sunday, 
and blossom all over with flowers ; and all night long this 
beauty rains its sweet influence down upon the world, a 
dew of cooling loveliness, a charity of God to soothe and 
heal and bless. Boys in cities look up from the noisy 
street at the large silent faces of the stars, and learn to 
fancy, and to wonder too. In the country some fair- 
cheeked maid, bidding her lover a long-deferred and re- 
luctant and oft-repeated " Good-night," eyes that tranquil 
miracle, and as his steps fade from her ear the heavenly 
beauty enters to her soul, and over-gladdens with starry 
delight her bosom's throbbing joy, and all night long she 
dreams her tranquil prophecy ; — she and her lover both 
are stars, and, married in heaven by the Great God him- 
self, journey through the night, 

" Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim." 

The early marketer, in rough garments, riding through 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 37 

the darkness, bringing men's bread to town, or he that 
drives heavy oxen, bringing oxen's food to town, 

" Still by the vision splendid 
Is on his way attended/' 

and cheers the weary miles with such companionship as 
this. The mariner on the Atlantic, stemming eastward, 
meets the darkness which spots at once one half the 
globe, and with many an upward look and with many an 
inward thought, sails through the night, thinking when 
some bright particular star will stand a moment over his 
home, and look down on his new-born baby, cradled on 
its mother's breast. And then the morning hastens to 
meet it, and so the ring of darkness, fringed with beauty 
at its descending or receding edge, moves slowly round 
the world, dotted above with stars, and chequered below 
with more romantic dreams, and all night long these stars 
move round the centre of the world, each one a beauty 
and a mystery, and all night long o'er city and field and 
sea, this hanging garden blooms for old and young, and 
rich and poor, 

" Out-blazoning all earth's wealthy Babylons." 

At length they fade away. The delicate posies of the 
night go first, and only a few great, hardy, venturesome 
stars endure the near approach of day, their white light 
gleaming through the morning red. Then they too pale 
away and cease, leaving the solitary sun as monarch in 
the desert sky. 

On earth men cultivate the flower of flame. The pub- 
lic street blossoms all night through ; nay, in every house 
all day men keep the seed of fire, shut up perhaps in flint 
or steel or in some chemist's drugs ; but as the sun with- 
draws they sow the spark, and with vulgar tallow, oil, or 



38 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

coal, or wood, rear up the lovely flower of flame, adorn- 
ing with such ornament their evening meal, turning its 
beauty to use, and its use to beauty too. 

In all these things the eternal beauty of the world 
speaks to us. Nay, to my mind they are windows where 
through I look into the purposes of the eternal loving- 
kindness and tender mercy. Do you suppose it was by 
accident that God thus starred the earth and sky with 
loveliness, and set angels in the sun, and ordained each 
particular star as an evangelist of beauty ? I tell you, 
No ! But in these hieroglyphs he publishes the wisdom 
and the friendliness of the Infinite. 

Men sometimes think it is only rich men and lords and 
kings and presidents that can own beauty. It is not so. 
I own all the beauty of the stars. Blue-eyed Lyra is 
mine ; mine is the many-colored morning ; and the ring 
which marries day and night, its beauty is my own ; and 
all the fair-shaped loveliness of grass, and root, and corn, 
and leaf, and flower, and beast, and bird, and tree, — it is 
all mine, entailed on me by the Great God before crea- 
tion. Yet my possession bars no other right. It is a 
philanthropic God who made the world, — the world it- 
self a commonwealth, and all its beauty democratic, alms- 
giving of the Almighty unto your heart and mine. 



THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD A PROOF OF GOD'S LOVE. 

The forces of nature are indeed wonderful. The more 
I learn thereof, I am astonished still the more, — at the 
forces all about us, which build up the mountains, which 
frame a tree, or which spread out into the form of man j 
forces agricultural, chemical, electrical, vital, spiritual, 
which man slowly weaves to use for great purposes, turn- 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 39 

ing nature into humanity. But that is what I should ex- 
pect; I see that all this is necessary for the material 
comfort and existence of the world. But the abundance 
of beauty in the world is what the wisest of men would 
not dare look for. If you go to a farmer's homestead, 
you expect to find what belongs to his craft, — the tools 
wherewith he catches and bridles and tames nature, di- 
recting and spurring the ground to human work. In his 
whereabouts you look for oxen, horses, sheep, swine, for 
ploughs and scythes, reaping and threshing tools ; you 
expect corn in his granary, hay in his barn, roots in his 
cellar, seeds laid by for years to come ; and in his wife's de- 
partment, you expect household articles, dairy furniture, 
the smell of milk and new butter. But if you should 
find native shrubs set round his house, blooming in abo- 
riginal loveliness, as New-England plants will, all the 
year from April till October ; if you should find nicer 
plants set under his window, if 

" The jasmine clambers in flower o'er the thatch, 
And the swallow chirps sweet from her nest in the wall," — 

you would say, " This man is a great way before his 
neighbors, the wisest in his hundred." When you go in, 
if, in addition to agricultural and political newspapers and 
farming books devoted to sober use, you should find a 
basket-full of other books, volumes of poetry, the choicest 
in the world, — Homer, JEschylus, Yirgil, Dante,. George 
Herbert, Shakespeare, Milton, Burns, Wordsworth, Emer- 
son, — a dainty garden Avherein the other beauty of God 
flowered in perpetual spring, and whither the farmer and 
his household on Sundays, or on other days, turned in 
and freshened their faces with such encounter, and held 
communion with the eternal loveliness, — why, you would 



40 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

be astonished, and discover that this man is of kindred 
to the great of earth. 

Well, to me the world is just such a farmer's home- 
stead, and the surprise of beauty is a perpetual astonish- 
ment, showing me how rich is God in his motherly loving- 
kindness and tender mercy. It seems as if the Divine 
Love could never do enough for man. He satisfies the 
body's needs with bread, clothing, lodging, medicine ; 
there is a cradle for the baby, a staff for the old man ; and 
then the Great Father flings in this wilderness of beauty 
for waking men, and when slumber overtakes us a beauty 
more witching yet watches at the gates of the imagina- 
tion, and with beauty God blesses his beloved even in 
their sleep. Surely there is a great Benefactor some- 
where. And if the atheist will say that it is all chance, 
that it comes from nothing, and means nothing, — why, 
he even must ; at least, we must let him. And if the 
popular theologians say it comes from the wrath of an 
offended God, we must let them also have their way. 
But in all this I see the loveliness of the Infinite Father 
and Infinite Mother. Not a lichen scars the rock, not a 
star flames in the sky, but it tells of the infinite loveliness 
of the infinitely loving God. 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE WORLD OF MATTER TO THE 

WANTS OF MAN. 

It is very plain that the world of matter has always 
furnished man with all things needed at the time, and 
is so made that it is continually modified by man to meet 
all his progressive wants. The savage in New-England 
wanted a forest and game, a wigwam to live in, wood for 
his bows and arrows, acorns for his bread; and the 



AND MAN'S EELATION THERETO. 41 

world furnished him with these things. The Anglo- 
American, a civilized man, wants a mill, roads of iron, 
glass windows, coal fires, gas, a telegraph, portraits 
painted by the sun ; and the world of matter furnishes 
these things just as readily as it furnishes bear-skins and 
acorns to Uncas. Once man only wanted something to 
keep his feet off the ground while he walked. Nature 
affords that, and he is satisfied for the moment. Next 
he wants to ride, and not walk. Nature gives him the 
ox and the ass. Then man wants to go a little faster, 
six or ten miles an hour. Nature says, " There is the 
horse, sir, and the camel ; catch as catch can." Then he 
wants a horse that will go forty or fifty miles an hour. 
And Nature says, " There is steam, my dear sir, catch 
that ; there is lightning, put that in harness ; ride fifty 
or a hundred miles if you will, and send your thought as 
fast as you please, only make your road where you want 
to go, let your thought lead the way, and the lightning 
of heaven will be sure to follow." Man wants to cipher. 
A smooth stone on the beach helps him at first to cal- 
culate ; then there are the diagrams which God has 
written above our heads, and mankind studies the mag- 
nificent geometry of the Almighty God in the heavens, 
which were the great ciphering-board of Archimedes, 
Newton, La Place, and Leverrier. Thus the outward 
world has got somewhere everything which everybody 
needs for the use, enjoyment, and development of all his 
faculties. The cupboard of Nature is never bare. 



man's power over the world the result of work. 

Man feels the force of circumstances, and longs for 
power over the world. First he asks it by miracle, of 



42 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

God, and tells how Moses crossed the Red Sea ; then by 
magic, of the devil, and tells how witches ride a broom 
from Salem to Marblehead. But this power of man 
comes of a different kind. The Golden Age is no tempta- 
tion of a devil, offering bread instead of a stone ; no 
miraculous gift outright from God. This power over 
matter and human instinct, this power to create new cir- 
cumstances, comes by work,- — work of the body, work 
of the mind. Eden is not behind us ; Paradise is not a 
land of idleness which Adam lost by his first free step. 
It is before us. It is the result of toil ; and that toil 
brings with it opportunity for the use, development, and 
enjoyment of every faculty of the body, every power of 
the mind. A poetic Hebrew said that Moses led Israel 
through the Reel Sea by miracle. Suppose it were true ; 
it were nothing in comparison with the English Trans- 
portation Company, with a line of steamers sailing each 
week, which carry Egyptians, Israelites, men of all na- 
tions, and will insure any man's property for a penny in 
the pound. The New-England puritan told how, by 
magic, a witch rode from Salem to Boston, the devil 
before, and she behind, on the crupper of a broom ; and 
he looked up and trembled, and wished he had the 
power. What was that in comparison with what we see 
every day, when, not a witch, but lightning, rides, not 
the crupper of a broom, but a permanent wire, from 
Boston to New York, or where you will, and when it is 
not the devil, but a scientific man who postilions the 
thought across the air ? What, I say, is miracle, what is 
magic, what are the dreams of miracle, the superstitions 
of magic, in comparison with the results of plain work 
which God puts in our power ? Ask a miracle of God, 
— and there is no answer. The world is the answer, 
and it lies before us. Ask magic of the devil, — there is 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 43 

none that moves the wind. Ask the result by thought 
and work, and the result comes. 

Man wants a farm, and he asks for it, — " Lord, give 
me a farm," in his prayer. Says the Father, "There 
is land and water ; make your farm just as you like it. 
Is not the soil rich enough ? There is sea-weed on the 
shore, lime at Thomaston, guano at the Lobos Islands ; 
make it as rich as you like." Man wants summer roses 
in the winter hour ; and the Lord says, " Rear them just 
as you will." He wants ships, and the Lord sends him 
to the mountain and mine, and under his plastic hand 
the mast grows in the valley, and the hemp-field blos- 
soms with sail-cloth. He wants a factory, and the 
Merrimac is ready to turn his wheels ; wants schools, 
colleges, lyceums, libraries, and the Infinite God says to 
him, " My little child, for these there are the material 
means under your hand ; there are the human means 
over your shoulders. Use them, make what you like." 
If the man learns, Joy plucks a rose by every path-way, 
and puts it in his bosom. If he learns not, Want cuts a 
birch in every hedge-row, and the idle fool is whipped 

to School. 

At this day the men of foremost religious develop- 
ment are the idealizing power of the human race, that 
family of prophets which never dies out. They have the 
ideal of a better state of things, a family of equals, a 
community without want, without ignorance, without 
crime, a church of righteousness, and a state where the 
intuitions of conscience have been codified into statutes. 
These things are all possible, just as possible as the 
farm, the shop, the factory, and the school. Desire only 
points to the reserve of power that one day shall sat- 
isfy it. 

There are two little birds fluttering about the human 



44 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

family. One is I have ; the other is Oh, had I. One is 
the bird in the hand ; the other the bird in the bush, 
which is worth two of the bird in the hand. The high- 
est function of I have is to lay the egg, whence comes 
forth the fairer and lovelier bird Oh, had I. She flies 
off to the bush, and we journey thither, finding new 
treasures at every step. We see the ideal good. The 
child cries for it ; the child-boy cries to his mother, the 
child-man cries to his God, both clamoring for the result. 
But the wise God does not give it outright. He says to 
the child-man, " Pay for it, and take it. Earn your 
breakfast before you eat it, and then take what you like. 
Desire the end, do you, my little man? Desire the 
means to it, and then you shall have it. There is a 
reserved power in matter, another in man. Build your 
family, church, and state, just as beautiful as you like. 
All things are possible to him that believeth. Build 
and be blessed. Lo, I am with you to the end of the 
world ! " 



THE EFFECT OF POWER IN THE MATERIAL WORLD UPON 
THE MIND OF MAN. 

Alexander Von Humboldt — the ministers call him 
an atheist — says, " We find even amongst the most sav- 
age nations a certain vague, terror-stricken sense of the 
all-powerful unity of the natural forces with the exist- 
ence of an invisible spiritual essence manifested in those 
forces ; and we may trace here the relation of a band of 
union linking together the visible world and that higher 
spiritual world which escapes the grasp of the senses." 

The general aspect of nature, with its vast power and 
constant law, has a direct influence to waken reverence 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 45 

and something of awe. The sublimit} 7 of the ocean, the 
grandeur of the mountain, the wide plain and great 
river, fill all thoughtful men with vague, dreamy longings 
toward the great Cause and Providence which creates 
them all, and fills them all with wondrous life. So the 
thought of the great trees, the wide-spread forest, house 
and home to such worlds of life, the bright wild flower, 
the common grass and grain, food for beast and man, — 
wakens religious emotions in the best and worst of us all. 
Still more, perhaps, the sun, moon, and stars come home 
to our consciousness and stir the feelings. Infinite na- 
ture speaks thus to all men, in all lands, in every stage 
of culture, highest and humblest. This is the reason 
why the rude man worships the objects of nature first, 
and makes gods of them ; this is the rude beginning of 
mankind's outward religion, which represents the inner- 
most facts of religious consciousness. These poor ma- 
terial things are the lowly rounds in the ladder which 
mankind travels on, till we come to a knowledge of the 
infinite God, who transcends all form, all space, all time. 
The great and unusual phenomena of nature affect the 
religious feelings with exceeding power, such as an 
eclipse of the sun or moon, the appearance of comets, 
that " from their horrid hair shake pestilence and war," 
an earthquake, a storm, thunder and lightning. To you 
and me these things are not troublesome, but to the wild 
man, the savage, or the half civilized, they bring great 
fear and dread, and thereby waken the religious feeling, 
which thence slowly tends on to its ultimate work of 
peace and joy and love. This terror before the violence 
of nature is exceedingly valuable to the savage man, 
and it plays the same part in the history of his religion 
that want has played in the history of his toil and 
thought. It directs faculty to its function. Once noth- 



46 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

ing but hunger and fear would make man toil and think; 
then in his rudeness, nothing but the violent aspect of 
the world would rouse his soul from its savage lethargy; 
then storm and earthquake, thunder and lightning, were 
the prophets which spake to man. To the rude the 
teacher must also be rude. But this fear tormenting 
man so, he presently goes and studies nature, to see if 
.there be cause for fear, and the knowledge which he 
gains thereby is real joy. 

Well did a great Roman poet, two thousand years ago 
■ — copying a greater poet, whose reason surpassed even 
his mighty imagination — say, " Happy is he who can 
understand the true causes of things, and tramples under- 
neath his feet all fear, inexorable fate, and the roar of 
angry hell." At length men find that the eclipse or the 
comet was not harmful, that the storm came not in wrath, 
that the earthquake tells nothing of an angry God, only 
of a globe not finished yet, that the thunder and light- 
ning are beneficent, that the powers of the earth, the 
round ocean, and the living air are full of love. The law 
of nature leads men to behold the Law-giver, and the 
benevolence which he finds in the vast majority of cases 
makes him certain he shall find, it when he understands 
those cases which, he knows not yet. He goes from 
" nature up to nature's God," and when he knows the 
earth, its air, water, land, its powers of motion, vegeta- 
tion, animation, knows the solar system, which maintains 
for earth its place, knows the astral system, which fur- 
nishes earth its spot, when he looks on the unresolved 
nebula, which may perhaps be another astral system, so 
far away that it looks like dust of stars scattered in some 
corner of the sky, — then does his soul run over for that 
dear God who established such relation between the 
cosmic universe and the astral system, between that and 



AND MAN'S EELATION THERETO. 47 

the solar system, between that and the earth, between 
the earth and his body and spirit, his mind and conscience, 
heart and soul, and then he turns and loves that God with 
all his understanding, with all his heart and strength ; 
nature from without leagues with spirit from within, and 
constrains him thus. 



THE WORLD OF MATTER AS AFFECTING THE IMAGINATION. 

The world of matter affects the imagination : it offers 
us beauty. How beautiful are the common things about 
us ! The trees, 

" Their bole and branch, their lesser boughs and spray, 
Now leafless, pencilled on the wintry sky " — 

or the summer trees, with their leaves and flowers, or 
their autumnal jewels of fruit, — how fair they are ! Look 
at the grasses, whereon so many cattle feed, at the grains, 
which are man's bread, and note their beautiful color and 
attractive shape. Walnuts, apples, grapes, the peach, 
the pear, cherries, plums, cranberries from the meadow, 
chestnuts from the wood, — how beautiful is all the 
family, bearing their recommendation in their very face ! 
The commonest vegetables, cabbages, potatoes, onions, 
crooked squashes, have a certain homely beauty, which 
to man is grace before his meat. Nothing common is 
unclean. Then there is the sun all day, the light shift- 
ing clouds, which the winds pile into such curious forms, 
all night the stars, the moon walking in brightness 
through the sky, — and how beautiful these things are ! 
Then what heavenly splendor waits for and ushers in the 
day, and attends his departure when his work is done. 



48 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

How our eye cradles itself in every handsome rose, — 
and all the earth blossoms once each year. 

How shape and color fit our fancy, and stars so far off 
that their distance is inconceivable impinge their beauti- 
ful light on every opening eye. What delight these 
things give us — a joy above that of mere use ! Even 
the rudest boy in Cove Street looks up at the stars, and 
learns to wonder and rejoice, and is inly fed. Set him 
down on the seashore next summer, and how the beauty 
of its sight and sound will steal into his rude, untutored 
heart, as the long waves roll toward the land, comb over 
and break with " the ocean wave's immeasurable laugh ! " 
With what joy will he gather up the refuse which the 
sea casts upon the shore, the bright-colored weeds, the 
curiously-twisted shells, the nicely-colored pebbles, worn 
into so fair and elliptical a shape and polished off so 
smooth. Thus material nature comes close to the imagi- 
nation of man, even in the rudest child. No North Amer- 
ican savage but felt his heart leap at the bright sparkling 
water of the river, or the sunny lake, or the sublimity of 
the New Hampshire mountains ; and in the names which 
he left there, has he set up his monument of the intimate 
relation between his imagination and the world of matter, 
which he felt and recognized. This passing delight in 
nature's beauty helps to refine and elevate all men. The 
boy who puts a dandelion in his button-hole, the girl who 
stains her cheek with wild strawberries in June — seek- 
ing not only to satisfy her mouth with their sweetness, 
but to ornament her face with their beauty, — are both 
flying upward on these handsome wings. 

But man is so in love with the transient beauty of na- 
ture that he captures it and seeks to hold it for ever. He 
puts the sound of nature into music, which he records in 
the human voice or in wooden or metallic instruments ; 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 49 

he paints and carves out loveliness on canvas and in 
wood and stone. Patriarchal Jacob is in love with the 
rainbow, and so puts its colors into Joseph's coat to keep 
nature's beauty, while he also clothes Rachel's first-born 
and longed-for boy. Thought commands toil, and bids it 
preserve the precious but precarious beauty which the 
world of matter so lavishly spreads out on earth in flow- 
ers, or scatters over the " spangled heavens " in stars. 
Man is uplifted and made better by this effort. When 
you find an Ojibbeway Indian with one stone copying the 
form of a blackbird upon another, depend upon it he is 
setting up a guide-board whose finger points upward to 
civilization, and the tribe of Ojibbeways will travel that 
way. Thus closely following the male arts of use come 
the feminine arts of beauty, — painting, sculpture, archi- 
tecture, music and poetry. " They weave and twine the 
heavenly roses in earthly life ; they knit the bond of love 
which makes us blest, and in the chaste veil of the 
Graces, watchful, with holy hand, they cherish the eter- 
nal fire of delicate feelings." So nice is the relation be- 
tween the world of matter and man's imagination that 
beauty, which is our next of kin on the material side, 
helps us up continually, takes us to school, softens our 
manners, and will not suffer them to be wild. The first 
house man ever entered was a hole in the rock, and the 
first he ever built was a burrow scooped out of the 
ground : look at your dwellings now, at the Crystal Pal- 
ace, the Senate House at Washington, at these fair walls, 
so grateful to the eye, so welcome to the voice of man ! 
Man's first dress, what a scant and homely patch it was ! 
look at the ornamented fabrics which clothe Adam and 
Eve to-day, in such glory as Solomon never put on ! Con- 
sider the art of music, which condenses all nature's sweet 
sounds ! man's first voice was a cry ; to-day that wild 

4 



50 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

shriek is an anthem of melody, a chain of " linked sweet- 
ness long drawn out." Consider the art of the painter 
and the sculptor, who in superficial colors, or in solid 
metal or stone, preserve some noble countenance for many 
an age, and a thousand years hence eyes not opened now 
shall look thereon, and be strengthened and gladdened. 
From this intimate relation of the world of matter to 
man's imagination come the great sculptors, painters, 
architects, and musicians, yea the great poets, Shake- 
speare, Milton, and their fair brotherhood and sisterhood 
of congenial souls, — softening the manners of man, and 
inspiring his heart, all round the many-peopled globe. 

Now see on how nice an arrangement this relation 
rests. Matter furnishes food, shelter, medicine, tools ; and 
the pursuit of these educates the understanding, which 
man did not ask for, and wisdom which he did not hope 
to have is thereby thrown in. There is beauty also ; it 
is food for the imagination, shelter, medicine, and tools 
for subtler needs. This gives also a higher education to 
a nobler faculty. Beauty does not seem requisite to the 
understanding alone, it is not valuable to man's mere 
body, certainly it does not seem necessary to the world 
of matter itself; but it is requisite for the imagination, 
and this thread of beauty, whose shape and color so 
witches us, runs through all the cosmic web ; it is tied 
in with the subtle laws of animation, vegetation, motion ; 
it is woven up with attraction, affinity, heat, light, elec- 
tricity ; it is connected into the disposition of the three 
great parts of the earth, air, water, land, complicated 
with the subtle chemical character of each ; it depends 
on the structural form of the earth, that on the solar 
system itself. So when you rejoice in a musical sound, 
in the sight of flowers, in the bloom on a maiden's cheek, 
when you look at a charcoal sketch or a bronze statue, 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 51 

when you read a drama of Shakespeare, or listen to an 
essay of Emerson, — then remember that the relation be- 
tween matter and mind which made these things possi- 
ble, depends on the structure of the solar system, and 
was provided for millions of millions of years before there 
was a man-child born into the world. 



SPRING. 

How mighty are the forces in the world of matter, — 
attraction, affinity, light, heat, electricity, vegetation, the 
growth of plants, animation, the life of beast, bird, reptile, 
insect ! Yet how delicate are the results thereof! It 
seems strange that a butterfly's wing should be woven 
up so thin and gauzy in this monstrous loom of nature, 
and be so delicately tipped with fire from such a gross 
hand, and rainbowed all over in such a storm of thunder- 
ous elements. But so it is. Put a little atom of your 
butterfly's wing under a microscope, and what delicate 
wonders do you find ! The marvel is that such great 
forces do such nice work. A thoughtful man for the 
first time goes to some carpet factory in Lowell. He 
looks out of the window, and sees dirty bales of wool 
lying confusedly about, as they were dropped from the 
carts that brought them there. Close at hand is the 
Merrimac River, one end of it pressed against the New 
Hampshire mountains and the sky far off, while the other 
crowds upon the mill-dam and is pouring through its nar- 
row gate. Under the factory it drives the huge wheel, 
whose turning keeps the whole town ajar all day. Above 
is the great bell which rings the river to its work. Be- 
fore him are pullies and shafts ; the floor is thick-set with 
looms ; there are rolls of various-colored woollen yarn, 



52 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

bits of card pierced with holes hang before the weaver, 
who now pulls a handle, and the shuttles fly, wedding 
the woof to the expectant warp, and the handsome fabric 
is slowly woven up and rolled away. The thoughtful 
man wonders at the contrivance by which the Merrimac 
River is made to weave such coarse materials into such 
beauty of form, color, and finish. What a marvel of ma- 
chinery it is ! None of the weavers quite understand it ; 
our visitor still less. He goes off wondering, thinking 
what a head it must be which planned the mill, a tool by 
which the Merrimac transfigures wool and dye stuff into 
handsome carpets, serviceable for chamber, parlor, stair- 
case, or meeting-house. 

But all day, you and I, President Buchanan, the Ameri- 
can Tract Society, the Supreme Court of the United 
States, all the people in the world, are in a carpet factory 
far more wonderful. What vast forces therein spin and 
weave continually ! What is the Merrimac, which only 
reaches from the New Hampshire mountains to the sea, 
compared to that great river of God on whose breast the 
earth, the sun, the solar system, yea, the astral system, 
are but bubbles, which gleam, many-colored, for a moment, 
or but dimple that stream, and which swiftly it whirls 
away ? What is the fabric of a Lowell mill to that carpet 
which God lays on the floor of the earth, from the Arctic 
Circle to the Antarctic, or yet also spreads on the bottom 
of the monstrous sea ? It is trod under foot by all man- 
kind ; the elephant walks on it, and the royal tiger. 
What multitudes of sheep, swine, and horned cattle lie 
down there, and take their rest ; what tribes of beasts, 
insects, reptiles, birds, fishes, make a home therein, or 
feed thereon. Moths do not eat away this floor-cloth of 
the land and sea. The snow lies on it, the sun lurks 
there in summer, the rain wets it all the year ; yet it 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 53 

never wears out ; it is dyed in fast colors. Now and 
then the feet of armies in their battle wear a little hole 
in this green carpet, but next year a handsome piece of 
botanic rug-work covers up the wear and tear of Sebas- 
topol and Delhi, as of old it repaired the waste of Mara- 
thon and Trasimenus. Look, and you see no weaver, no 
loom visible ; but the web is always there, on the ground 
and underneath the sea. The same clothier likewise 
keeps the live world tidy and in good trim. How all 
the fishes are dressed out, — those glittering in plate 
armor, these only arrayed in their vari-colored jerkins, 
such as no Moorish artist could paint. How well clad 
are the insects ; with what suits of mail are the beetle 
and bee and ant furnished. The coat of the buffalo never 
pinches under the arm, never puckers at the shoulder ; 
it is always the same, yet never old-fashioned, nor out of 
date. The shoes of the reindeer and the ox inherit that 
mythical Hebrew blessing pronounced on those of the 
Israelites ; they wax not old upon their feet. The pigeon 
and humming-bird wear their court-dress every day, and 
yet it never looks rusty nor threadbare. In this grand 
clothiery of the world everything is clad in more beauty 
than many-colored Joseph or imperial Solomon ever put 
on, yet nobody ever sees the wheel, the loom, or the sew- 
ing machine of this great Dorcas Institution which car- 
pets the earth and upholsters the heavens, and clothes 
the creatures of the world with more imperial glory than 
the Queen of Sheba ever fancied in her dream of dress 
and love. How old is the world of matter, — many a 
million years, yet it is to-day still fresh and young as 
when the morning stars first sang together, and all the 
sons of God shouted for joy. Not a power of the earth 
has decayed. The sea, 

" Such as creation's dawn beheld, it rolleth now." 



54. THE MATERIAL WORLD 

The stars have been watching many a million years ; yet 
in all that heavenly host not a single eye has turned dim. 
The sun has lost nothing of his fire. Never old, the 
moon still walks in maiden beauty through the sky, and 
though men and nations vanish, " the most ancient 
heavens are fresh and strong." Centripetal and Centrif- 
ugal are the two horses of God that make up the won- 
drous span that drawls the heavenly chariot ; they are 
always on the road, yet never cast a shoe : and though 
they have journeyed for many a million years, are to-day 
fresh and fleet and road-ready, as when first they drew 
Neptune, the earliest born of this family of planets, in 
his wide orbit round the central sun. How old the w T orld 
is ; yet well-clad, and its garments as fresh as if they 
were new, spick and span, in every thread. 

What a revival of nature is just now going on in all 
Europe, Asia, North America, and the Islands which dot 
the frozen sea with green. To the arctic world, which 
for months sat in darkness, exceeding great light has 
come. Truly here is the out-pouring of the Spirit of 
God ! Yet nobody preached the reasonableness of eter- 
nal damnation to the alewives, the shad, and the salmon, 
which now abound in our waters ; but with no minister 
to scare them they know what they shall do to be saved, 
for the Spirit of God comes into these mute disciples, 
who crowd up the little streams, float into the ponds, and 
spread in the great streams, and there drop, as an offer- 
ing, into the temple-chest of the Almighty, all that they 
have, even their living, and then, like the poor widow in 
the New Testament story, pass out of human sight, swal- 
lowed up in that great sea of oblivion where man beholds 
nothing, but where God never loses sight of an alewife, 
having provided for its existence and the accidents of its 
history from before the foundations of the world. From 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 55 

his eye neither the great sun in heaven nor the spawn 
of an alewife in the sea is ever for a moment lost or hid. 
What new life is there in the air, which hums with little 
insects new-born, short-lived, yet not one of them afraid 
to die. Why should it be ? The Infinite Mind, which 
is Cause and Providence to all things that be, knows the 
little track of an ephemeron as well as the calculated 
orbit of this world, which teams its thousand million men 
from age to age along its well-proportioned path. " Fear 
not, little flock of ephemera," God says to them, " lo, I 
am with you also to the end of the world. Not a fly 
shall fall to the ground without my providence." In some 
warm spring day, in the shallow waters of a sluggish 
river, there sports a shoal of little fishes, new-born, trying 
their tiny fins in waters which are at once their bed and 
board. Suddenly a swarm of little insects, just waked 
into new life by the sun, springs from the bank and dark- 
ens the surface of the water, for a yard or two, with a 
cloud. The fishes which play there spring into the air, 
and in a few minutes all this cloud of flies has been swal- 
lowed down. But the fly was born with his children 
cradled in his body, and in the bosom of the fish itself 
this new generation finds its garden of Eden, where it 
eats, if not from the tree of knowledge, at least the tree 
of life. So while the new-born ephemera give the new- 
born fish a breakfast, the eater unconsciously adopts the 
children of the fly, nurses them in his body, and when 
they are grown to their majority, sets free these crea- 
tures, which had so strange a birth and bringing up in 
this little floating college of a country brook. Does God 
take care for oxen ? asks St. Paul. Ay, as well as for 
man, and sends his apostles to these little creatures 
whose life is so brief. The perpetuation of their race is 
provided for, and they have organs which take hold on 



56 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

eternity. Truly the Infinite God is fatherly providence 
to the little fly bora in a spring day, and perishing in an 
hour after it sees the light. 

What wonders of nature go on all around us to-day ! 
From the top of some tall house, look on the fair mantle 
which Nature has just cast on all the hills about us, and 
which falls with such handsome folds into every valley. 
Go into any one of the towns near at hand, and see what 
there takes place. There is not an apple-tree but has 
put its wedding garments on. The elm has half ripened 
its fruit; the maple is making provision for whole forests 
of future joy ; while the trees which the farmer plants 
for profitable use, and not for beauty, are white with the 
oracles of prophecy. It is a Revival of nature, whereof 
the Sun is the evangelical preacher. No city govern- 
ment warns him off from the Common, for he preaches 
the everlasting gospel of the blessed God, wherewith he 
rejoices both old and young. There is no heresy in that. 
All nature hears him, and expounds his word of life. The 
silent fishes plentifully obey the first of God's commands, 
the tuneful birds repeat their litany, chanting their morn- 
ing and evening psalm ; all the trees put on their bridal 
garments, — these candidates for the divine communion, 
who have come to take part in this great Epiphany, the 
natural manifestation of God to these Gentiles of the 
field and wood. They also share the Pentecost of the 
year, and celebrate their thanksgiving with such abun- 
dance as they can or know. What a Pentecost of new 
life is there ! Every bush burns and is not consumed ; 
yea, greatens and multiplies in its bloom and blossom, 
and the ground seems holy with new revelation ; it is a 
White Sunday all round the town. How grand and vig- 
orous the new blade comes out from the earth ; and ere 
long these will be sheaves, and oxen will laboriously drag 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 57 

home the farmer's load of grain, which in due time will 
be changed to other oxen, and then likewise to farmers 
too, and so be resurrected in his sons and daughters. 
What a marvellous transfiguration is that ! first the seed, 
then the plant, then the harvest, next bread, and at length 
Moses, Elias, Jesus ! No Hebrew writer of legend could 
ever finish half so fair a miracle as this, wherein is no 
miracle, but constant law at every step. Last autumn 
in some of the pastures fire ran along the wall, and left 
the ground black with its ephemeral charcoal, where now 
the little wind-flower lifts its delicate form and bends its 
slender neck, and blushes with its own beauty, gathered 
from the black ground out of which it grew ; or some 
trillium opens its painted cup, and in due time will show 
its fruit, a beautiful berry there. So out of human soil, 
blackened by another fire which has swept over it, in 
due time great flowers will come out in the form of spir- 
itual beauty not yet seen, and other fruit grow there, 
whose seed is in itself, and which had not ripened but 
out of that black ground. Thus the lilies of peace cover 
the terrible field of Waterloo, and out of the grave of our 
dear ones there spring up such flowers of spiritual love- 
liness as you and I else had never known. It is not from 
the tall, crowded warehouse of prosperity that men first 
or clearest see the eternal stars of heaven. It is often 
from the humble spot where we have laid down our dear 
ones that we find our best observatory, which gives us 
glimpses into the far-off world of never-ending time. 

In the hard, cold winter of our northern lands, how do 
we feel a longing for the presence of life. Then we love 
to look on a pine or fir tree, which seems the only living 
thing in the woods, surrounded by dead oaks, birches, 
maples, looking like the grave-stones of buried vegeta- 
tion : that seems warm and living then ; and at Christ- 



58 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

mas men bring it into meeting-houses and parlors, and 
set it up, full of life, and laden with kindly gifts for the 
little folk. Then even the unattractive crow seems half 
sacred, through the winter bearing messages of promise 
from the perished autumn to the advancing spring, — this 
dark forerunner of the tuneful tribes which are to come. 
We feel a longing for fresh green nature, and so in the 
shelter of our houses keep some little Aaron's rod, bud- 
ding alike with promise and memory ; or in some hya- 
cinth or Dutchman's tulip we keep a prophecy of flowers, 
and start off some little John to run before, and with his 
half gospel tell of some great Emmanuel, and signify to 
men that the kingdom of heavenly beauty is near at 
hand. Now that forerunner disappears, for the desire of 
all nations has truly come ; the green grass is creeping 
everywhere, and it is spangled with many-colored flowers 
that come unasked. The dullest bush tingles with new 
life in all its limbs. How the old apple-tree blushes at 
the genial salutation whispered by the wind, the Gabriel 
of heaven, that freest agent of Almighty power, " Hail, 
thou that art highly favored ! Thou hast found favor 
with God, and in due time shalt rejoice, and drop thy 
Messianic apples down." Already the multitude of the 
heavenly host is here, — the blackbird, the robin, the 
brown thrush, the purple finch, and the flre-hangbird ; 
these build their nests, while they sing, " Glory to God 
in the highest, on earth peace, good will toward men." 

What if there was a spring time of blossoming but 
once in a hundred years ! How would men look forward 
to it, and old men who had beheld its wonders tell the 
story to their children, how once all the homely trees 
became beautiful, and earth was covered with freshness 
and new growth. How would young men hope to be- 
come old that they might see so glad a sight ; and when 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 59 

beheld, the aged man would say, " Lord, now lettest 
thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen 
thy salvation ! " Nay, wise men who knew the signs of 
the times would follow that star of spring till it stood 
over that happy country where the young child was, and 
then fall down and worship him. But now, in every 
year, in all lands, this Messianic beauty is born, this star 
stands still over every garden, every farm. It pauses 
over each elder-bush, and does not disdain the buttercup 
and dandelion, for, like that other Messiah, these also lie 
in the oxen's crib. 

What a solidarity there is between the world of mat- 
ter and its inhabitants. They suit and fit each other like 
him and her. From inorganic matter up to the highest 
man there is a gradual and continual ascent. Vegetation 
is a ring, whereunto animation is a living precious stone, 
with which God marries man to nature ; and the world 
of spirit and the world of matter are no longer twain, but 
the two are wedlocked into one. How the world of mat- 
ter is grateful to our flesh ! To canny man the world is 
very kind. It feeds us, clothes, houses, heals, and at last 
folds us in its bosom, whence our flesh is a perpetual 
resurrection, and rises again into other men, while the 
soul invisible fares further on in the ascending march of 
infinite progression, whereof we see the beginning, and 
to which there is no end. 

How the world delights us with its beauty, — feeding, 
clothing, housing, healing, the nobler part of man ! Even 
the savage and the baby love the handsome things of 
earth. Little Two-year-old, a lumpy baby, as merry as a 
May-bee, comes stumbling through the grass, and loves 
to pick the attractive flowers, drawn by their very love- 
liness, that will not feed his mouth, but feed his soul. 
Thoughtful man makes a grand eclecticism of loveliness 



60 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

from earth, air, water, sky, and rainbows both Joseph's 
and Josephine's coat, builds his house with architectural 
beauty, has painting, sculpture, and music to attend 
him. 

What a fair sign of God's all-embracing love is found 
in this presence of beauty, — a sweet charm which fas- 
cinates us to refinement and elevation of character ! It 
does not seem needful to the conception of the world 
that nature should be beautiful. Why need any star be 
limned so fair ? The moon must walk, — but need she 
walk in beauty ? Why should the form of the apple, 
peach, nut, the blossom of the Indian corn, and every lit- 
tle grain, be made so handsome ? Surely they could feed 
us just as well otherwise. Why set off beast and bird 
with such magnificence, and so clothe the grass of the 
field, which is here to-day, and to-morrow is cast into the 
oven ? Why make the morning and night such handsome 
children, and purple the anemone with the charcoal 
where heedless boys have burned the grass, and out of 
battle-fields bring such loveliness, beauty cradled in the 
bloody arms of strength? You can read it all. A great 
poet told it two hundred years ago : " Mighty Love ! 
Man is one world, and hath Another to attend him ; " 
and it answers to his being more tenderly than he thinks. 
So long as a single star burns in heaven with fire, or a 
rose on earth flings out her own loveliness, or the w^ater- 
lily rings beauty's sweet-toned bells, no Hebrew or Chris- 
tian revelation shall make me doubt the infinite loving- 
kindness of God, to saint and sinner too. Every violet, 
every dandelion, every daffodil, or jonquil, is a preacher 
sent to. tell us of the loving-kindness of God. For that 
doctrine, at this hour there is a sermon on every mount, 
east, south, west, or north. 

And how this world of beauty and use is a school-house 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 61 

also for the mind, and a church likewise for the soul, to 
inspire men with devotion ! In tropic lands, swept by 
hurricanes, rent by earthquakes, or desolated by volca- 
noes, I do not wonder that men believe in a devil who 
sometimes gets the better of the Good God. Supersti- 
tion is a natural weed in the savage human soil, which 
yet the rising religious blade overtops and lives down, 
and kills out at last. It is not surprising that every- 
where, rude but thoughtful men looked on the falling 
earth and the steadfast sky, and saw the many forms of 
wondrous, yet uncomprehended life, and said, " All these 
things are gods," and sought to worship them. Nature 
is the primer where man first learns of God. There, 
" day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night 
showeth knowledge. There is no voice nor language/ 7 

— yet the eye finds revelations. Not only to Hebrew 
Moses, but to all humankind, God speaks in every burn- 
ing bush, and the rising of nature's song wakes new 
morning in the soul of man. This perpetual renewal of 
vegetation, this annual wonder of blossoming, — what a 
religious revelation it offers to us I How it fills us with 
admiration, trust, and love ! Every flowering bush burns 
with God, and is not consumed. With neither trick nor 
miracle, he changes water into wine, on all the vine-clad 
hills of Italy, France, and Spain, and fills not five thou- 
sand men, but five thousand times two hundred thousand, 

— a thousand million men, — every day ; and on the 
broken bread of this meal supports the multitudinous 
armies of beast, bird, fish, insect, reptile. No little worm 
is turned away unfed from that dear Father's board where 
the trencher is set, and all things made ready for the 
ephemeron born this minute, and to perish the next hour. 
Compared to this wonder of law, the tales of miracle, of 
the Old Testament or New, are no fact, but poor poetry. 



62 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

They are like ghosts among a market full of busy men 
and women. 

How old is the material world, and yet forever fresh 
and young ! So is it with the human world. If the race 
of men be thirty thousand years old, then there are a 
thousand fathers between us and the first man; and yet 
you and I are just as new and fresh, and just as near to 
God, as the first father and mother. We derive our hu- 
manity from Him, not them ; and hold it by divine patent 
from the Creator of all. Mankind never grows old. You 
and I pass off as leaves are blown from the trees, decay, 
and are exhaled, becoming but vapors of the sky again. 
So also do nations grow old and pass away. At the gate 
where Egypt, Assyria, Judgea, Greece, Sparta, and Rome, 
were admitted through, stand Spain and Italy to-day, 
beating at the door, and crying, " Divinest Mother, let 
thy weary daughters in ! " They will pass to the judg- 
ment of nations, and in due time Britain and America 
will be gathered to their fathers, but mankind will have 
still, as now, the bloom of immortal youth about his hand- 
some brow. Thirty thousand years, perhaps sixty, nobody 
knows how long, has he lived here : still not a hair is 
gray, no sense is dull, the eye of this old Moses of human- 
ity is not dim, nor is his natural strength abated ; and 
new nations are still born as vigorous as the old, and to 
much better estate. 

The last three generations have done more than any 
six before in science, letters, art, religion, and the great- 
est art of bearing men and building them into families, 
communities, nations, and the human world. The reli- 
gious faculty vegetates into new churches, animates into 
new civilization men and women. Tell me of Moses, 
Isaiah, Confucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Pythagoras, Jesus, 
Paul, Mohammed, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin — a whole 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 63 

calendar full of saints ! I give God thanks for them, and 
bare my brow, and do them reverence, and sit down at 
their feet to learn what they have to offer. They are but 
leaves and fruit on the tree of humanity, which still goes 
on leafing, flowering, fruiting, with other Isaiahs and 
Christs, whereof there is no end. As the tree grows 
taller, the wealth of blossoms is more, and so too the har- 
vest of its fruit. When the woods have not a leaf, when 
the ocean has not a drop, when the sun has not a parti- 
cle of life, still shall the soul of man look up to God, and 
reverence the Infinite Father and Mother, love and trust ; 
for God created man in his own image, and gave him to 
be partaker of his own immortality, and no devil can filch 
his birthright away from the meanest man. No virtue 
fades out of mankind. Not over-hopeful by inborn tem- 
perament, cautious by long experience, I yet never de- 
spair of human virtue. The little charity which palliates 
effects sometimes fails,but the great justice which removes 
the causes of ill is as eternal as God. So the most pre- 
cious corn of humanity which I gather from the pastures 
of ethics and history, and out of the deep, well-ploughed 
field of philosophy, I sow beside the waters, nothing 
doubting. Some falls on a rock, where suddenly it starts, 
and presently withers away. The shallow-minded bring 
no fruit to perfection, and only produce ears of chaff. 
Some drops by the wayside, and covetousness, lust, 
vanity, and ambition, devour it up, rioting to-day on 
what should be seed-corn for future generations. Some 
is blown before bigots, who trample it under their feet, 
and turn again and rend me with their sermons and their 
prayers. But I know that most of it will fall into good 
ground, — earnest, honest men and women, where in due 
time, if not in my day, it will spring up, and bear fruit of 
everlasting life, some thirty-fold, some forty, some sixty, 



64 THE MATERIAL WORLD 

and some a hundred. Hopeful mankind is not forgetful 
to entertain strangers, nor lets an angel pass for lack of 
invitation. Tenacious mankind lets slip no good that is 
old. 

"One accent of the Holy Ghost 
The heedless world has never lost," — 

nor ever will. 

But while the human race is on the earth, — its con- 
tinuing city, ever building, never done, — our individual 
life has also another spring. Death is but a blossoming 
out from the bulbous body, which kept the precious germ 
all winter long, and now the shards fall off, and the im- 
mortal flower opens its beauty, which God transfers to 
his own paradise, fragrant with men's good deeds and 
good thoughts ; nay, where their good wishes and prayers 
pass at their proper worth. 

There runs a story that one Passover Sabbath day, 
when Jesus was a boy of twelve, he stood with his mother 
at the door of their little cottage in Nazareth, — his 
father newly dead, and his brothers and sisters playing 
their noisy games. And he said, u mother, would that 
I had lived in the times when there was open vision, and 
the Lord visited the earth, as in the days of Adam, Abra- 
ham, and Moses. These are sad times, mother, which 
we have fallen in." 

Mary laid the baby, sleeping, from her arms, and took 
a sprig of hyssop out of the narrow wall, and said, " Lo, 
God is here ! and, my boy, not less than on Jacob's Lad- 
der do angels herein go up and down. It is spring-time 
now, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land, and 
the blossom of this grape-vine is fragrant with God. The 
date-tree, the white rose of Sharon, and the lily of the 
valley, root in Him. He is in your little garden out 
there, not less than in grand Eden, with Adam and Eve. 



AND MAN'S RELATION THERETO. 65 

Look how the setting sun has sketched out all the hills • 
What a purple glory flames in the west, and is reflected 
in the east, where the full moon tells us it is Passover 
day." 

" Nay, mother/' said the thoughtful boy ; " but He has 
left the soul of Israel for their sins. So Rabbi Jonas told 
us in the synagogue to-day. Oh, that I had lived with 
Elias or Amos, when the spirit fell on men ! I had also 
been filled with Him. 7 ' 

And Mary took up her wakened baby, who began to 
cry, and stilling it in her bosom, she said, " The sins of 
Israel, my boy, are like Rebecca's cry. God is more 
mother to the children of Israel than I to her. Do you 
think He will forsake the world? This little baby is as 
new as Adam ; and God is as near to you as he was to 
Abraham, Moses, Amos, or Elias. He speaks to you as to 
Samuel. He never withdraws from the soul of men, but 
the day-spring from on high comes continually to the 
soul of each. Open the window, and the sun of right- 
eousness comes in." 

And Jesus paused, the story tells, and sat there, and 
while his mother laid the little ones silently away in 
their poor cribs, he watched the purple fade out from 
the sky, and the great moon pouring out its white fire, 
with a star or two to keep her company in heaven. And 
when the moon was overhead, there came two young 
lovers, newly wed, and as Jesus caught the joy of their 
talk to one another, and smelt the fragrance of the 
blooming grape, there came a gush of devotion in his 
young heart, and he said, " My Father worketh hitherto ; 
I also will work," — and laid him down to his dreams 
and slept, preparatory to the work which fills the world. 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 



THE GRANDEUR AND THE BEAUTY OP MAN. 

OF all the wonderful things of G-od, man the won- 
derer is himself the most wonderful. He is so 
well-born, so variously and richly gifted with personal 
faculties, which are so numerous for action, and which 
aspire so high; so amply furnished with material means 
to exercise his faculties and achieve his aspiration, with 
all eternity for his work-day, and all immensity to grow 
in, — it is amazing how much is shut up within how 
little ; within a creature a few feet high, living on earth 
some threescore years ! Man is the jewel of God, who 
has created this material universe as a casket to keep 
his treasure in. All the material world is made to min- 
ister to man's development, — a cupboard of food or a 
cabinet of pleasure. The ox bears his burdens ; the 
arctic whale feeds the scholar's or the housewife's lamp ; 
the lightnings take their master's thought on their 
wings, and bear it over land or underneath the sea. The 
amaranthine gems which blossom slowly in the caverns 
of the ground, — these are the rose-buds for his bosom. 
The human Elias goes up in his chariot of flame ; he has 
his sky-chariot, and his sea-chariot, and his chariots for 
land, drawn by steeds of fire which himself has made. 

You admire the height of the mountains. But man's 
mind is higher than the tallest of them. You wonder at 
the " great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping 
innumerable, both small and great beasts," as the Psalm- 

66 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 67 

ist says. But man's mind is wider than the sea, compre- 
hends the deep, learns its laws, makes the tide serve him, 
and the ocean becomes a constant ferryman and common 
carrier of the world. Nay, in the stone which was once 
the ocean's rim, man reads the most private history of 
the sea itself, what fishes swam in its deeps a million 
years ago, what rushes grew on its border, what thunder- 
showers, from what direction, left their mark on its 
sandy beach, what oyster sucked its ooze. For him 
the waters chronicle " the ocean wave's immeasurable 
laugh," and record the smile which rippled round the 
ocean's face a million years ago, and there man reads it 
to-da} r . . 

In all the wonders of God, nought is so admirable as 
the admiring man ! Other things in comparison seem 
only as the sparks which flew when God's arm beat the 
anvil, and fashioned man. The material splendors of the 
world, grand and gorgeous as they are, to me seem very 
little when measured by the spiritual glories of the 
meanest man. The Andes fill me with less amazement 
than the mountain-minded Humboldt, who ascends and 
measures them. To the Christian pilgrim, the mountains 
about compact Jerusalem are as nothing to the vast soul 
of Moses, Esaias, Samuel, Jesus, who made the whole 
land sanctified in our remembrance. Yonder unexpected 
comet, whose coming science had not heralded, who 
brought no introduction from Arago or Leverrier, and 
presented himself with no letter of recommendation, save 
the best of all, his comely face, is far less glorious than 
the rustic lover, who thinks of those dear eyes which 
are watching those two stars that every evening so 
sweetly herald the night. Nay, this hairy stranger is 
far inferior to the mind that shall calculate its orbit, and 
foretell its next arrival to our sight. High and glorious 



68 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

are the stars ! What a flood of loveliness do they pour 
through the darkness every night, — a beauty and a mys- 
tery ! But the civilized man who walks under them, 
nay, the savage who looks up at them only as the wolf 
he slays regards them, has a fairer and a deeper beauty, 
is a more mysterious mystery ; and when the youngest 
of that family has grown old and hollow-eyed, and its 
light has gone out from its household hearth, the savage 
man, no longer savage, shall still flame in his career, 
which has no end, passing from glory to glory, and pour- 
ing a fairer light across the darkness of the material 
world. The orbit of the mind is wider than creation's 
utmost rim ; nor ever did centripetal and centrifugal 
forces describe in their sweep a comet's track so fair- 
proportioned as the sweep of human life round these 
two foci, the mortal here, and the immortal in the world 
not seen. 



man's nature greater than his history. 

I see that during the whole life of mankind, be it six 
or sixty thousand years, very much has been done, and 
the results are treasured up in science, laws, ethics, 
forms of society and faith. I consider the attainments 
of the human race as a whole, and reverence it very 
much. I see a record of it in some great library, and I 
wonder at mankind, so great, in its life to have learned 
all that is treasured up in the Vatican at Rome, or the 
National Library at Paris, — and I can learn so very 
little in all my life, not even enough to understand these 
flowers in my hand. I look over the list of mighty men 
who have been the schoolmasters of the race, I see how 
they are forgot and passed by by other schoolmasters, 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 69 

and I wonder at the spiritual riches of man which can 
afford to lose whole generations of philosophers, poets, 
mighty men, and never feel the loss. I wonder at the 
institutions of mankind, the laws, the organizations of 
church and state. But I see that the spirit of man is 
greater than all these ; that it can pull them all down 
and build greater yet, that man's nature is more than his 
history. So I reverence the past, its great institutions 
and great men ; but I reverence the nature of man far 
more than these, and put more trust in that than in all 
the achievements of man, all the institutions, all the 
great men of history, — who are but as the water- 
cresses, and wind-flowers, and violets, which come out 
in a single spring day, whilst our human nature is the 
great earth itself, whose bosom bears them all, and pre- 
pares for a whole spring-time of fairer flowers, a whole 
summer and autumn of richer herbage and abundant 
fruit. Then to me the achievements recorded in the 
Vatican at Rome and the National Library at Paris are 
but a trifle, when measured by the human soul ; but as 
Newton's primer and Christ's first lesson-book compared 
with the mighty stature of those lofty men. 



HUMAN NATURE ADEQUATE TO ITS END. 

Certainly we do find in human nature some things 
which are revolting. Many things of that character 
come out in human history. I suppose there is not a 
grown person in this audience who has not often been 
disgusted with himself, finding meannesses, littlenesses, 
basenesses in his own character. The amount of self- 
ishness and consequent cruelty now in the world, and 
the still greater amount in times past, has a very dark 



70 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

and ugly look. Sometimes it does seem as if it would 
have been better if mankind could have started on a 
little higher plane of existence, and been more devel- 
oped before they were created, so to say. Attend a 
thieves' ball, of small thieves, with their appropriate 
partners, in a dancing garret in Boston, or a thieves' ball 
in the President's House at Washington, of great politi- 
cal thieves, who steal territories and islands, — watch 
their motions, study their character, and you do not 
think very highly of human nature, — at the first thought 
and sight, I mean. But — not to pause now, and look a 
little deeper, in a ball of little thieves in a garret, or of 
great thieves in the President's saloon — it is rather idle 
to grumble against human nature, for, after all, this 
human nature is the best nature we have got, and we are 
not likely either to get rid of the old or to get hold of a 
new ; and besides, it is exactly the nature which the 
Infinite God has given us, and it is probable, not to look 
deeper at this moment, that he made it just as he meant 
to make it, neither better, neither worse, and made it 
for a good end, an end, too, which the dancing of little 
thieves with their partners or of great thieves with 
theirs will not frustrate nor ultimately pervert. 



MAN THE HIGHEST PRODUCT OF MAN'S WORK. 

Man is the highest product of his own history. The 
discoverer finds nothing so grand or tall as himself, 
nothing so valuable to him. The greatest star is that at 
the little end of the telescope, the star that is looking, 
not looked after nor looked at. " Columbus," says his 
monument, "gave a new world to Castile and Leon." 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 71 

He really opened a new destination to mankind, and the 
world turned on his rudder hinges, as he set the prow 
of his vessel westward, 

" And was the first that ever burst 
Into that silent sea." 

But that service, nay, the effort to perform it, gave him 
a character which to him was worth more than all Amer- 
ica. The highest product of art is not the picture or 
statue ; it is the artist. In the soul of Raphael there 
was something to him worth more than all which looked 
out of the eyes of his Madonna or St. Cecilia. In paint- 
ing the fabled resurrection and ascension of Jesus, he 
assisted at his own actual resurrection and ascension ; 
painting the picture, he was becoming a man. For the 
most of men his highest work was his painting ; for him- 
self it was his character. There is this twofoldness in 
all human work. There is the visible result for the 
most ; it is the crop of the farmer, the minister's sermon, 
the special service which each one of us does. But 
there is an invisible result of character for the individ- 
ual, that he carries up with him to heaven ; it is his, not 
another's. Messrs. Grist and Toll grind for the little 
town of Eat-and-live all their days. Quite useful are 
these two dusty millers; nay, indispensable to every man 
and woman. But to them, their little mill grinds out not 
corn only into meal, but virtue, wisdom, trust in God, 
noble character. So along with their daily bread, if 
they are men, they are creating the bread of life for 
their own souls, and living on it. Milton and Shake- 
speare left us great words, and thereby did much service 
to mankind ; but in writing their books, they composed 
their character at the same time. Besides the Paradise 
Lost which the great poet left behind him, there was a 



72 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

Paradise Found, which grew in his own silent conscious- 
ness, and which he took along with him when he shook 
off the dusty flesh he wore beneath. Since that time 
there has been many a cheap or costly edition of his 
Paradise Lost, not another of his Paradise Found. The 
fair autographic copy thereof he carried with him, and 
unfolded its immortal pages before the eyes of God. So 
is it with us all. Our work is double. The pendulum 
of our life swings ever backward and forward, with its 
double beat, — time, eternity, — eternity, time. But 
the word time is what we hear, and that side of the per- 
pendicular is the side of the vibration we see and know. 
But all things we do are provisional, only our character 
is ultimate and final. 



The first man had all the faculties of the Royal Acad- 
emy, and all the faculties of the whole Calendar of Saints; 
but these faculties lay in him as the water-power lay in 
the Merrimack River, and the steam-power of England 
in her rivers and mines of coal, all undeveloped and all 
unknown. 

Human nature is equal to all the emergencies of 
human history. 



THE EVIL OF PUTTING A LOW ESTIMATE ON MAN. 

The idea which we form of man, like the idea which 
we form of God, is a powerful element in our civilization, 
either for good or ill. This idea will strongly affect the 
condition and character of every one. " Call a man a 
thief, and he will pick a pocket," is already a proverb. 
Convince him that he is the noblest creation of the great 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 73 

God, that his beauty shames these flowers at my side, 
and outblazons the stars of heaven, — then he begins to 
aspire to have a history, to be a man ; and this aspiration 
corresponds to the great nature in him. Soon as you 
convince him of this nature he takes a step forward, and 
puts out wings to fly upwards. 

I look with anguish on the two schemes of thought 
which degrade the nature of man, hostile in many other 
respects, — the materialism of the last or the present 
century, and the popular theology of all Christendom, 
both of which put a low estimate on man. The one 
makes him a selfish and mortal animal, only body and 
bones and brains, and his soul but a function of the brute 
matter he is made of. The other makes him a selfish 
and immortal devil, powerful only to sin, and immortal 
only to be eternally tormented. The popular theology of 
Christendom, one of the many errors which man has cast 
out of him, as incidents of his development, has much to 
answer for. It debases God, and it degrades man. It 
makes us think meanly of ourselves, and dreadfully of 
our Creator. What makes it more dangerous and more 
difficult is that both of these errors are taught as a 
miraculous revelation from God. himself, and accordingly 
not amenable to human correction. 

Now self-esteem is commonly large enough in the 
individual man ; it is but rarely that one thinks of him- 
self less and less highly than he ought to think ; for the 
great function to be accomplished by self-esteem is so 
very important that it is always, or almost always, abun- 
dantly provided for. But it is one of the commonest 
errors in the world to think meanly of human nature 
itself. It is also one of the most fatal of mistakes. Nay, 
individual self-esteem is often elated by the thought that 
general human nature is rather contemptible, and the 



74 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

special excellence that I have does not come from my 
human nature, which I have in common with every beg- 
gar in the street and every culprit that was ever hanged, 
but from my personal nature, and is singular to me ; 
not the possibility of the meanest man, but the peculiar 
possession of myself. A man thus gratifies his self- 
esteem at the expense of his real self-advancement and 
bliss. 

Then, too, it is thought an acceptable and beautiful 
mode of honoring God to think meanly of his chief work, 
that it is good for nothing ; for then, it is said, we do not 
exalt the creature above the Creator, but give God the 
glory. That is, in reality, we give God the glory of 
making a work that is good for nothing, and not worth 
the making. I could never think that I honored an 
artist by thinking as meanly as it was possible on trial 
to think of the best work which that artist had brought 
to pass. 



THE FALSE IDEA OF WOMAN A CAUSE OF DEGRADATION. 

In all our great towns there is a class of women whose 
name is infamous. It is not considered Christian to rec- 
ognize them ; it would be thought unwomanly to have 
the smallest pity for the sisterhood of crime. What 
brought them to this condition ? Idleness or unwilling- 
ness to work? Did lust drive them headlong to that 
yawning gulf of shame and misery and sin, where horrid 
shapes make up the triune devil of this female hell? 
The secret cause of it all is the idea pervading society 
that woman is inferior to man, and created for his con- 
venience, with only duties, and not rights ; and that man 
may trample her under his feet, and brush off the blood 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 75 

from his soul, as the dust from his shoes. A man stum- 
bles and falls, and we wipe off the smutch. But a 
woman, ay, when she sins in this way, — seldom from 
her own crime, often from another's, — we tell her that 
she falls like Lucifer, never to hope again. 

Did you ever visit a House of Refuge, and see the 
wrecks of womankind which go to pieces in a stormy 
world, and leave their fragments to rot there ? You pick 
up on the seashore at Truro or Cape Ann some relic of 
a vessel, perhaps an oar, with some mark by which you 
know when she suffered wreck. You think of the swift- 
sailing ship, of the day when she was launched, of the 
builder's sober joy, as he stood on the shore and saw the 
baptism of his child, when the Ocean as godfather took 
her and pressed her to his heart. And then you think 
of the sad wreck this vessel made, how many hopes went 
down ; after all that forged iron and seasoned oak could 
do against the storm, she sunk. What is a vessel com- 
pared to a woman ? What is the shipwright's sober joy 
at the launching of his craft compared to a mother's joy 
when her new-born daughter fills her fond, expectant 
arms ? What is shipwreck to the wreck of womankind ? 
You look at that fragment of woman, perishing by slow 
decay at your hospital on Deer Island, and you remem- 
ber the mother who bore her, the bosom that gave her 
life, the prayer_s which, consecrated her forehead, the 
childhood and girlhood of this woman ; you think of the 
first gushing of the fairest well-spring in human life, when 
she first knew the sentiment of love ; you think of her 
poverty, her trials and her sorrows, her prayers, and hev 
trust in God, as you look on that wreck, — and then you 
see the tragic side of the picture, and the injustice which 
society has done to her. They tell a story of old time, 
that the people of Athens sent a tribute every year of 



76 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

five young maidens to the Minotaur, some horrid monster 
of a king, who slew them. How many, think you, do we 
pay as a tribute annually out of this city ? Can you 
count them by fives, or by scores, or by hundreds ? Nay, 
but by thousands only. We do not send them in solemn 
pomp, as the Athenians did ; they go at midnight, to a 
death of shame. 



woman's spiritual transcendence. 

There is a deep to which reason goes down with its 
flambeau in its hand ; there is a height to which imagina- 
tion goes up, on wide wings borne ; and that is the deep 
of philosophy, that is the height of eloquence and song. 
But there is a deeper depth, where reason goes not, a 
higher height, where imagination never wanders ; and 
that is the deep of justice, that is the height of love. It 
is the great wide heaven of religion. Conscience goes 
down there, affection goes up there, the soul lives up 
there. And that is the place of woman. Woman has 
gone deeper in justice, and has gone higher in love and 
trust, than man has gone. 



man's spirit reported in his physical condition. 

A man's soul presently reports itself in his body, and 
telegraphs in his flesh the result of his doings in spirit ; 
so that the physical condition of the people is always a 
sign of their spiritual condition, whereof it is also a result. 
I mean the bodily health of men, the food they eat, the 
clothes they wear, the houses they live in, the average 
age they reach, — all these depend on the spiritual con- 



THE NATURE OF MAN. « 77 

dition of the people, and are a witness to the state of 
their mind and conscience, their heart and their soul. 
True religion, like sunshine, goes everywhere ; or a false 
form of religion, like night and darkness, penetrates into 
every crack and crevice of a man's life. 



FALSE ESTIMATE OF THE BODY. 

The Christian Church has done great injustice to the 
human body. Paul of Tarsus said, " I know that in my 
flesh dwelleth no good thing. 77 That ill-considered word 
has been a curse to mankind. It has peopled the most 
civilized lands on earth with puny men and sick women, 
and thence with starveling babies, born but to fill up the 
grave. " I know there is no good thing in my flesh, 77 
said Paul. He knew nothing like it ; he dreamed so, or 
thought he dreamed so. God put no bad thing there ; 
it is full of good things ; every bone from the crown to 
the foot is a good bone ; every muscle is a good muscle ; 
every nerve which animates the two is a good nerve. 
Do you think that God in making man gave him a body 
that was fit only to be trod under foot, with no good 
thing in it? Trust your own flesh and your own soul, 
not the words of Paul, — a great brave man, but some- 
times mistaken, like you and me. 



THE BEAUTY OF YOUTH. 



How beautiful is youth, — early manhood, early wo- 
manhood, how wonderfully fair ! what freshness of life, 
cleanness of blood, purity of breath ! What hopes ! 
There is nothing too much for the young maid or man to 



78 • THE NATURE OF MAN. 

put into their dream, and in their prayer to hope to put 
into their day. young men and Avomen, there is no 
picture of ideal excellence of manhood and womanhood 
that I ever draw that seems too high, too beautiful for 
your young hearts ! What aspirations there are for the 
good, the true, the fair, and the holy ! The instinctive 
affections, — how beautiful they are, with all their pur- 
iple prophecy of new homes and generations of immortals 
that are yet to be ! The high instincts of reason, of con- 
science, of love, of religion, — how beautiful and grand 
they are in the young heart, fragrantly opening its little 
cup, not yet full-blown, but with the promise of a man ! 
I love to look on these young faces, and see the firstlings 
of the young man's beard, and the maidenly bloom blush- 
ing over the girl's fair cheek ; I love to see the pure 
eyes beaming with hope and goodness, to see the uncon- 
scious joy of such young souls, impatient of restraint, 
and longing for the heaven that we fashion here. §o 
have I seen in early May among the New-England hills 
the morning springing in the sky, and gradually thinning 
off the stars that hedge about the cradle of the day ; and 
all cool and fresh and lustrous came the morning light, 
and a few birds commenced their songs, prophets of many 
more ; and ere the sun was fairly up you saw the pinky 
buds upon the apple-trees, and scented the violets in the 
morning air, and thought of what a fresh and lordly day 
was coming up the eastern sky. 



OLD AGE THE ONLY NATURAL DEATH. 

I take it that old age is the only natural death for 
mankind, the only one that is unavoidable, and must re- 
main so. As virtue is the ideal life of man, so is old age 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 79 

the ideal death ; it is the only one that mankind ap- 
proves. Nobody complains of dying at a hundred, at 
ninety, or at eighty. We do not mourn for our dear ones, 
thus naturally departing in that respectable way, at that 
far age, as we mourn for the new-born, the half-grown, 
or full-grown mature man or woman. At almost four- 
score my brothers and sisters laid their father's vene- 
rable bones in the ground, not without natural and 
irrepressible tears ; at almost fivescore, my father, a ven- 
erable man. laid in the earth the bones of his mother, not 
doubtless without a tear ; but there was not that heart- 
rending agony which comes when a young man or a child 
is cradled in the dust. That is our time to die. If poetic 
Tennyson had writ a volume of elegies about his grand- 
father, deceased at a hundred and ten or a hundred and 
twenty, and exhausted the English tongue in forms of 
grief, he would have been laughed at all round the land 
for his unnatural complainings ; but now our hearts beat 
in unison with his sad mourning In Memorlam of his well- 
loved friend, nipped down in early life, only a promise, 
not a performance. 



WELL-BORN PEOPLE. 

Parents transmit their organization and character to 
their children. What father or mother is there who 
would not wish to leave his issue a great estate of human 
virtue, — in their bones and muscles, health, strength, 
longevity, beauty, and in their soul, wisdom, justice, 
benevolence, piety, rather than the opposite of all these ? 
Every thing must bear fruit after its kind, you after yours. 
Men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles. 

Men talk of good birth, good blood. No man honors 



80 THE NATURE OP MAN. 

the well-born more than I ; but who are they ? In Amer- 
ica we say they are the sons and daughters of the rich ; 
wealth is nobility, its children are well-born. In Europe 
we are told that they are the sons and daughters of lords 
and kings ; birth from official station is nobility. fool- 
ish men ! Of all the children of European royalty in 
eighty years, there has not been born a single boy or girl 
who in common life would have won the smallest distinc- 
tion. Amongst the decent people of Europe, kings, of 
all others, are the most ill-born. Where do the rich fam- 
ilies of New England go to in the third generation ? Look 
over Boston and see. Whence come the noble talent, 
the great virtue, nay, the poetry, the science, the elo- 
quence, the literature, which adorn the land ? They are 
not rocked in golden cradles. It is not royalty in Europe, 
it is not wealth in New England, which is father and 
mother to the great masterly talent which controls and 
urges forward the mass of the people, with its masterly 
mind and conscience, heart and soul. No ! it is the 
children of wholesome industry, the children of intelli- 
gence, of morality, of religion, who are the well-born. 
Virtue is nobility j all else is but the paint men write its 
name withal. Health, strength, beauty, — they are phys- 
ically well-born, though dropped anonymous in the ob- 
scurest ditch ; still, more, wisdom, integrity, philanthropy, 
religion, — these are well-born, noble, yes, royal, if you 
will, for they are the kingly virtues of humanity, and 
whoso has them, though he be cradled amongst cattle, 
and laid in the crib of an ass or ox, he only is the best 
born of men ! 

Who is there that would not covet that royalty for 
himself, and still more, achieve it for his daughter and 
his son, that, when his bones are crumbling in some ob- 
scure churchyard, in his children the strong and flame- 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 81 

like flower of manly virtue may blossom fair, and ripen 
its seed ; and sow the green earth gladsomely withal ? 



GREAT MEN. 

A great man is never an accident. He comes as the 
end of a long series of causes, which get summed up in 
him. There is nothing miraculous in the origin of such 
a man ; least of all should we say, that a man of genius 
was born of no human father, for none is so obviously 
connected with the present condition and past history of 
mankind. There is a special preparation made for him 
in the nation whence he comes ; the seed of that crop 
was put into the ground ages before, and he sums up and 
represents the particular character of his nation. Men 
like Christopher Columbus are born only of maritime 
people ; their mothers smell of the sea. Mathematicians 
like Archimedes and Leverrier clo not spring up among 
the Sacs and Foxes, but in the most thoughtful nations 
only. I take it that Socrates could have come only out 
of the Greeks. He was Athenian all through. The 
special character of Rome re-appears in Julius Csesar, her 
greatest man ; her ambition, her taste for war and poli- 
tics, her immense power to organize men, and her utter 
indifference to human life, all come out in him. The two 
Bacons, the Monk and the Chancellor, Shakespeare, New- 
ton, Cromwell, the five greatest Englishmen, are not only 
human, but they are marked with British peculiarities 
all through. Franklin, the greatest man who ever 
touched our soil, is most intensely national ; our good 
and ill are condensed in him. This bright consummate 
flower of New England, this Universal Yankee, could 

6 



82 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

have been born and bred in no other land ; that human 
gold was minted into American coin. God makes the 
family of mankind, but he divides it out into special 
peoples, and each man is born with his nationality in him, 
and the Ethiopian cannot change his skin. Von Hum- 
boldt is possible only in Germany, and though he has 
lived in all the world, and talks and writes in many a 
tongue, yet the great features of his nationality are as 
plain in every book and letter he writes as his parents' 
likeness in his face. How quickly we distinguish be- 
tween black, red, and white men ; how readily separate 
those of our own color into English, American, German, 
French, Irish ! So the inner man is colored and shaped 
by the stock we come of. All that we do is stamped 
with nationality. 

This imperious condition of nationality would seem 
terrible if it came from accident or from blind fate. As 
the result of that divine Providence which knows all 
things beforehand, and makes all work together for good, 
it looks beautiful, and I take it for a blessing. God 
makes us one human nature, but diverse in nationality, 
that we may help each other. So the hand is one, but 
it is separated into five fingers, to make it pliant and 
manifold useful. Climate, natural scenery, the business, 
institutions, and history of the nation, — each makes its 
special mark on you and me. The mantle of destiny 
girdeth us all. 

The credentials of the great man of genius are writ in 
a larger and stronger hand, because he is to represent his 
nation in the great court of posterity. Great men are 
the highest product of any people, and they have never 
come out of mean nations, more than great trees out of 
a thin and ill-adapted soil. So every great man has the 
marks, I think, of his special family. Therefor a par- 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 83 

ticular preparation is long making, the ancestral ground 
for several generations sloping upwards towards the 
great mountainous man. If you study the family history 
of such a one, I think you always find finger-posts, one 
or two hundred years off, pointing to him, on the mater- 
nal or paternal side, — some aunt or uncle, or great- 
great-grandfather, who looks like him. So when he comes 
it is not by a coup de famille, not like a thunder-stroke 
out of the clear sky, but like the growth of an apple out 
of an apple-tree, a regular development out of the ances- 
tral stock, and no more surprising than that a lily root 
bears a lily flower. Each tree, material or human, bears 
after its kind. If any one of us could trace our ances- 
tral stock back two hundred years, we should find the 
proximate cause of the disposition born in us. Every 
farmer knows that is the rule of animals. So when he 
buys a cow, he wants to know not only the father and 
mother, but the creature's grandparents also. We all 
thus depend on our special parentage, and it is only more 
apparent in a great man. None of us stands alone, but 
we all lean on our fathers and mothers, and they on such 
as came behind them ; only as a great man is taller than 
the rest of us, we see how he leans, because it is on a 
larger scale. 

Now I take it that Jesus of Nazareth could have been 
born of no other nation than the Hebrew. That people 
comes out in his character, both its good and ill. The 
story that he had the Holy Ghost for his father is a fic- 
tion. The noble man is colored Hebrew all through. He 
is a Jew all over, and did not take that from one parent 
alone. He is as intensely national as Benjamin Frank- 
lin or Eobert Burns. Men say that divine inspiration 
controlled the human disposition in him ; but you see how 
the literature of his people colored his mind, and gave a 



84 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

hue to his every thought and word. He is so full of the 
Old Testament that it runs over in all his speech. The 
history of his people comes out with his religious doc- 
trines and expectations. The national idea of a Messiah 
affected him very strongly, turning his human genius 
into a special channel. He was not the less human be- 
cause he was also a Jew. 

When a great man comes, he affects men deeply and 
widely. Every Columbus leaves a new world for man- 
kind, some continent of art, science, literature, morals, 
religion, philanthropy. But just in proportion as such a 
man is great and original, and so capable to influence 
mankind for centuries, so does he at first waken opposi- 
tion, and fail to be appreciated, and that by whole multi- 
tudes of men. In his lifetime, nobody thought much of 
William Shakespeare as a poet. Bacon, a man of the 
world, the most original and cultivated thinker in the 
British Islands, must often have heard his plays. Cud- 
worth, a man of the university, the most learned man in 
all England, truly great, with a mighty range of compre- 
hension, and familiar with all literature, quoting the plays 
of other ages and other nations, never refers to Shake- 
speare. Neither of these great comprehensive men took 
any notice of the greatest genius Great Britain ever saw. 
That poetical sun rose and went up into the heavens, 
while these scholars sat in their corners and read by their 
rush-lights, but knew nothing of that great luminary 
which was making a new day all round the world. 

Colleges confer their degrees on the vulgarest of min- 
isters, and none others, save in exceptional cases. I 
doubt that Saint Paul ever got a D.D. put after his name 
in large letters ; possibly it was put before it in small 
ones. No Academy of Science bestows honor on the 
inventors of science. Men grumble at this ; even men 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 85 

of genius are sorry, and whine at such a fate, and com- 
plain to their wives and daughters that it is an ungrateful 
world, and a man of genius has a hard time of it ; — for 
he wants not only his genius to ride on through the sky, 
but a coach and six to trundle him along the street. 
Poor man ! When God sends genius, the philosophic 
of Socrates, the poetic of Shakespeare, or the religious 
of Jesus, there is no need that academies bestow their 
honors on him ; he gets his degree at first-hand, not 
from delegated officials. Such good wine needs no 
academic nor ecclesiastic bush. His college honors 
are conferred by the university of the people ; not until 
after he has ceased to be mortal, and gone home, where 
he sighs not for approbation, ecclesiastic or academic. 

The great man of genius is the immediate result of 
all the people's work. It comes not of himself. With 
much toil the Egyptians build up their pyramid, the 
work of a whole nation, its most lasting monument. 
But Jesus of Nazareth is not less the work of the 
Hebrew people, the last result of all their life, by far 
the greatest of the Hebrew pyramids, Palestine's noblest 
monument ; and the beginning of Jesus was when Moses 
led Israel up out of Egypt. 

The great man affects his people and their thought 
for a time proportionate to his power, and the direction 
he gives it. When he dies, his character lives for him ; 
his ideas, his spirit, have passed into the consciousness 
of the people, and continue there, a new force to create 
men like him. Shakespeare, Bacon, Newton, have been 
gathered to their fathers long since ; but how much 
is there which is Shakespearian, Baconian, Newtonian ; 
certainly a thousand times as much as when their great 
genius was condensed into the poet, the philosopher, 
and the mathematician. Benjamin Franklin is dead, and 



86 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

his body sleeps in the little Quaker churchyard at Phil- 
adelphia. But how much is there of the Franklin kind 
of man in America ; more than there ever was before, a 
thousand times as much as when he had it all. One or 
two hundred places in the United States are called after 
him, and his mind has gone into our mind more than 
his name into the continent's geography. The great 
man's character is not kept in the line of a single family. 
The ancestral tree roots under-ground a great while, 
grows in it* modest way for centuries, and in due time 
bears the great aloe blossom of genius, and then the 
tree dies. I think no family on earth ever bears two 
first-rate men. There is one Shakespeare, one Burns, 
and if there were two Bacons, they were not otherwise 
known to be related than that both were Englishmen. 
There is one Franklin, one Cuvier, one Leibnitz, one 
Kant. These men may have a thousand children, but 
the aloe flower of genius does not appear again on the 
tree that has borne it once. Perhaps every family is 
destined to bear a great man in the ages ; only some 
put out that blossom early, and others it may take a 
thousand years to mature it. But if the flower breaks 
down the tree, the fruit scatters its seed across the con- 
tinent. Mankind inherits the personal estate of genius, 
which does not descend in the family. To-day there is 
no Jesus, but how much more that is Jesus-like ; not in 
Judaea alone, but in all the world. All that he was now 
vests in the human race. This millionnaire of religion 
left his estate in trust to mankind. God is the guardian 
who manages it for the advantage of all ages. It 

" Spreads undivided, operates unspent : " 

nay, it thickens as it spreads, and is enlarged when it 
is spent. 



THE NATURE OP MAN. 87 

How pliant is human nature before the plastic power 
of a great genius ! When you and I hear some man of 
great mind and great rhetorical art utter his humanest 
thoughts, we swing to and fro as he also vibrates. His 
thought is in our thoughts, and if his cheek but blanch, 
ours also turns pale ; and we flush as his blood reddens 
in his face. So the great man affects mankind, not for a 
minute but for ages long. 



MEN OF TALENT AND MEN OF GENIUS. 

There are two classes of great men, — great men of 
talent, and great men of genius. They are unlike in 
their centre, very much alike in their circumference, 
where they meet and blend. There is one class of un- 
common persons who have more of what everybody has 
a little. They differ from the rest in quantity, not in 
kind. They do as other men, but better and stronger. 
They create nothing new, originate nothing ; but they 
understand the actual, they apply another man's original 
thought, develop and improve the old, execute much, 
invent little. They say what somebody else said and 
thought originally. They say what the great mass of 
the people think and cannot yet say. A man of this 
sort comes very close to the outside of men. That is 
the man of talent. Speaking practically, talent is exec- 
utive power in its various modes ; it is ability to adapt 
means to ends. On analysis, you find it is not superior 
power of instinct and spontaneous intuition, but only 
superior power of conscious reflection, power to know 
by intellectual process, to calculate, and to express the 
knowledge and the calculation. It is a great gift, no 
doubt. It is men of great talent who seem to control 



88 THE NATURE OP MAN. 

the world, for they occupy the headlands of society. 
In a nation like ours, they occupy the high positions 
of trade and politics, of literature, church, and state. 
Talent is as variable in its modes of manifestation as 
the occupations and interests of men. There may be 
talent for war, for productive industry, for art, philoso- 
phy, politics, also for religion. There are always a few 
men of marked talent in every community. With the 
advance of mankind, the average ability continually 
greatens ; it is immensely more in New England to-day 
than it was in Palestine two thousand years ago ; but 
the number who overpass the broad level which man- 
kind stands upon, I suppose, bears about the same ratio 
at all seasons to the whole mass. Equality in rights, 
with great diversity in powers, seems to be God's law 
everywhere. 

But now and then there rises up a quite other man. 
He differs from his fellows in quality as well as in bulk, 
— a man of finer material and nicer make. He discov- 
ers new things, creates new forms out of old substance, 
or new substance out of human nature. He originates, 
thinks what no man ever thought before. He comes 
close to what is innermost in mankind, and not only tells 
what you and I thought but could not speak, but what 
we felt and did not know. So he not only provides 
words for unuttered thoughts, and so interprets the 
reflection of men, but furnishes ideas for sentiments, 
and so makes us conscious of our innermost feeling. 
Thus he draws nearer to mankind than the other. 
Talent comes home to our business, genius also to our 
bosom. Out of dead timber the man of talent builds 
a scaffold for a house ; out of live nature the man of 
genius grows a great green forest, whence timber shall 
be cut and used so long as winds blow, and leaves are 



THE NATURE OP MAN. 89 

green. Working from the outside, talent weaves a web, 
stretching the warp, putting in the filling, thread after 
thread, stamps it with various borrowed forms, mechani- 
cally colored. That is well. But from the germ of life, 
genius bodies forth a plant, which grows from within, 
leaf by leaf, branch by branch, and then opens the 
flower, every petal developed in fragrant beauty, and 
matures the apple, rounded out from its central germ 
of life, curiously painted, but all the work done in the 
inside. Talent weaves, genius grows. One paints and 
tricks off the cheek of humanity with white and vermil- 
ion, laid on from the outside ; from the inside the other 
beautifies the cheek of humanity with blooming, vari- 
colored health. One is art, the other is life. 

The man of genius invents and originates, making new 
forms out of the commonest material. He finds general 
laws in facts that have been familiar to everybody since 
the world was. All the neighbors in Crotona twenty- 
three hundred years ago heard the two village black- 
smiths beat the anvil, one with the great hammer, and 
the other with the small one ; Pythagoras took the hint 
from that rhythmic beat, and brought the harmonic scale 
of music out from the blacksmith's " ten pound ten." 
Every boy sees that, in a right-angled triangle, the lar- 
gest side is opposite the square angle ; but Pythagoras 
discovered that if you draw three square figures, each 
as long as the three several sides of this triangle, the 
largest square will be as big as both the others. It 
was one of the grandest discoveries of mathematical sci- 
ence. Every priest in the Cathedral of Pisa two hun- 
dred and seventy years ago, and all the women and chil- 
dren at Christmas, saw the great lamps which hung from 
the ceiling, some by a longer, and some by a shorter 
chain ; they saw them swing in the wind that came in 



90 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

with the crowd, as the Christmas-doors, storied all over 
with mediaeval fictions, were opened wide. None but 
the genius of Galileo saw that the motion of these swing- 
ing lamps was always uniform and in proportion to the 
length of the chains, the lamp with the longest chain 
swinging slowest, and that with the shortest completing 
quickest its vibration. He alone saw that the swinging 
lamps not only distributed light, but also kept time, and 
each was a great clock, whereof he alone had the dial, 
and the hand pointed to the hour in his mind. Nay, for 
Hve hundred years in that great Cathedral these lamps, 
swinging slowly to and fro, had been proclaiming the 
law of gravitation, but Galileo was the first man who 
heard it. All the farmers in Cambridgeshire saw apples 
fall every autumn day, and a hundred astronomers scat- 
tered through Europe knew that the earth moved round 
the sun ; but only one man by his genius saw that the 
earth moved and apples fell by the same gravitation, and 
obeyed the same universal law. There were two or 
three thousand ministers in England two hundred years 
ago, educated men, and they were preaching with all 
their might, trying to make the popular theology go 
down with the reluctant Anglo-Saxon people, who hate 
nonsense. How dull their sermons, — telling the people 
that man was a stranger and pilgrim on earth, with their 
talk about Abraham's faith, and their quotation from the 
Epistle to the Hebrews. How dead they are now, those 
dreadful sermons of the seventeenth century, — save 
here and there a magnificent word from Jeremy Taylor 
or Robert South ! How dead they were then, — abortive 
sermons, that died before they were spoken ! But a 
common tinker, with no education, often in low company, 
hate4 for being religious, and for more than twelve years 
shut up in a jail, writes therein the " Pilgrim's Progress," 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 91 

which makes Calvinism popular, and is still the most liv- 
ing book which got writ in that century of England's 
great men, when Shakespeare and Milton and Herbert 
and Bacon and Taylor were cradled in her arms. Adam 
Smith takes the common facts known to all gazetteers, 
the national income and expenditures, the exports and 
imports, manufactures, the increase of population, &c, 
and by his genius sees the law of political economy, and 
makes national housekeeping into science. Shakespeare 
picks up the common talk of the village, what happens 
to everybody, birth, love, hope, fear, sorrow, death, and 
then what marvellous tragedies does he make out of the 
drama of every man's life ! They tell a story of a man 
in Greece, who, one day, walking along the seashore, 
picked up the empty shell of a tortoise, with a few of 
the tendons still left, and found it gave a musical note as 
he touched it ; he then drew threads across it from side 
to side, and out of the corded shell invented musical in- 
struments. Fire and water are as old as creation, and 
have been in man's hands some thirty or forty thousand 
years, I suppose ; there was not a savage nation in Asia 
or America but had them. Men. have married these two 
antagonistic elements together for many a thousand years, 
and water boils. But from these two Robert Fulton 
breeds a giant who is the mightiest servant of mankind, 
altering the face of nature and the destination of man. 
Every chemist knew that certain substances were sensi- 
tive to light, and changed their color by day ; nay, every 
farmer's daughter knew that March wind and May sun 
made cloth white and faces brown. But Niepce and Da- 
guerre had such genius that they took advantage of this 
fact, and set the sun to paint pictures in forty seconds. 
King Charlemagne not being able to write when called 
upon to sign his name, daubed his palm from the ink-horn, 



92 THE NATUKE OF MAN. 

and put his hand on the document, the great sign-manual 
of that giant Emperor. Nay, five hundred years before 
Moses, kings had seals with their names engraven there- 
on, and stamped them on wax. Thirty-five hundred years 
later, the genius of Faustus puts together a thousand of 
these seals, a letter on each, and therefrom makes a printed 
Bible. How hard they tugged at the bow-string and 
plied the catapult, to knock down the walls of a town in 
the middle ages. Schwartz makes gunpowder, and cross- 
bows and catapults go out of fashion. 

These are men of genius ; men of talent could never 
have accomplished these results which I have men- 
tioned. These are the men who really command the 
world, the original thinkers. There are not a great 
many of them. It seems necessary that seven-eighths 
of man's life shall be routine, doing to-day what we did 
yesterday, the same old thing over and over again. But 
now and then the great God raises up one man of genius 
in a million, who shovels away the snow, and makes a 
path where all men can walk, clean-footed and dry-shod. 
Let us reverence these men. 

Speaking practically, genius is power of construction, 
power to originate and create new forms out of old mat- 
ter, new matter out of human nature. Speaking philo- 
sophically, or by analysis, genius is great power of in- 
stinct, spontaneous intuition. That is the element of 
necessity, as it were, in genius. It is, next, great power 
of conscious reflection, great imagination in its greatest 
forms, great attention, the power to bend all the faculties 
to the special task in hand. This is the element of free- 
dom in genius. Genius knows the thing which it works 
upon and produces ; not always does it know itself. The 
same man is seldom synthetic to create, and analytic to 
explain the process of creation. Homer and Shakespeare 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 



93 



know how to make poetry, but not how they make it ; 
the art, not the analytic explanation. Yet others have 
the genius for self-knowledge, power of analytic con- 
sciousness ; but it is not often that the poet and the phi- 
losopher lodge in the same body. This human house of 
clay is not large nor strongly walled enough, nor nice 
enough, to entertain two such royal guests. Human na- 
ture is too great to be made perfect, all parts of it, in a 
single man ; 

" One science only will one genius fit, 
So vast is art, so narrow human wit." 

As, analytically speaking, genius is power of instinc- 
tive intuition, and power of conscious reflection, so prac- 
tically it is the highest power of work, power of sponta- 
neous work, power of voluntary work; and it is this 
which unites the womanly intuition with manly reflection. 
Genius is God's highest gift to man. 

One common delusion of young men is that they have 
genius, and that a man of genius need not work, but can 
accomplish great results with small efforts. Hence an 
ambitious young mechanic sometimes thinks he can get 
to the top of the ladder, without stepping on any of the 
rounds ; and the ambitious young trader scorns the sys- 
tematic and sober diligence of his father, and hopes to 
make a fortune at a stroke, and get his pile of gold in a 
few years, and not be a lifetime about it. " Nothing 
venture, nothing have," says he contemptuously, and on 
his tall borrowed horse he rides into Chancery. So the 
young scholar hopes to accomplish every thing by genius 
at a dash, to learn science without any study, to master 
a language by the inspiration of wine. But nothing 
comes of nothing. 

Real genius is power of work ; hard work of intuition, 
hard work of reflection, and a great deal of it. Nobody 



94 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

doubts the genius of Lord Bacon. England never saw 
a harder working man. "Newton saw the apple fall 
from the tree, and therein discovered gravitation/' says 
some thoughtless young man. The apple fell from the 
tree one day, but it was twenty years before Newton's 
great branches shook down gravitation; it was twenty 
years of hard work, often sixteen hours out of the 
twenty-four, sometimes twenty-four hours out of the 
twenty-four. The great poetic souls, the Shakespeares, 
Miltons, Goethes, were men of mighty genius ; they 
were men of mighty industry also ; and if Cuvier and 
La Place have the power of insight, they make the most 
zealous use of it. 

Now genius appears in as many diverse forms as there 
are human occupations and interests. Some have a 
genius for war, and are great fighters, — the Alexanders, 
Hannibals, Cassars, Attilas, Fredericks, Napoleons, and 
the rest of the masters in this dreadful art to kill. It 
was once the most honored of all ; it is far too much 
honored to-day. Others have genius for practical indus- 
try, the creation of use ; genius for agriculture, cattle- 
keeping, mechanic arts, navigation, and commerce. This 
form of genius has hitherto been but little honored, but 
is now getting the respect of the most enlightened na- 
tions. Some have a genius for art, the creation of beau- 
ty, — music, painting, sculpture, architecture. These 
are forms of genius which get honored long before the 
power of productive industry is much respected, for man 
adorns himself before he provides for his comfort, tattoos 
his skin before he weaves a coat to cover it. This class 
of men who have a genius for art are the most honored 
to-day by the educated portion of mankind, the world 
round. Then there is another department of genius, for 
philosophy, physics in its various departments, meta- 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 95 

physics, and theology. There is a progressive venera- 
tion for the great philosophers. Once they, like Anax- 
agoras, fled ont of the city, or, like Socrates, were poi- 
soned in it ; for as they were the bane of tyrants, so they 
were the prey of tyrants, all round the world. Others 
have genius for politics, — the application of ideas to 
human affairs, the organization of masses of men, and 
the administration of that organization. This is a very 
high mode of genius, always valued from the earliest 
days, and never too much. Lastly, there is genius for 
religion ; for piety, to feel and know God ; for morality, 
to know and keep his laws. With the instinctive mass 
of men, genius for religion is valued far above all the 
rest, because the man who has it Incarnates in himself 
the instinct of mankind, brings it to their consciousness, 
puts it into form, and is a leader of men in departments 
deemed by humanity most important of all. Now in the 
progress of mankind, the higher powers of instinct and 
reflection are continually developed, and so higher and 
higher forms of genius arise. 

Once all great genius was thought miraculous and 
divine. The poet called himself the Muse's son, and the 
priest said God came and told him the bright thought 
that entered his head. Now it is no longer wonderful. 

The man of a high- mode of genius has great power 
of instinct, and so he feels the sentiment of humanity 
which you and I feel, only he feels it first, feels it strong- 
est ; he outruns the instinctive mass of men, and in 
advance of them gets new justice, new piety ; and so he 
is more popular than the people are, for he knows what 
they only feel, and he feels to-day what they will feel 
the next year or the next millennium ; and that is the 
reason why the man of the highest form of genius is 
always so dear to the heart of humanity, to the instinc- 



96 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

five masses of men, not to those who have poorly edu- 
cated but a single faculty. Scholars say the people 
cannot understand a man of genius ; but it is in the 
bosom of the people that the man of genius makes his 
nest and rears his young. He has power of reflection, 
and so is master of his instinct, not its slave. He also 
translates the common feeling, which he shares, into 
thought, and common thought into speech, and makes 
the nation conscious of what it felt and did not know at 
all. This power of reflection makes him master of men, 
but his power of instinct keeps him our brother still. 
Great talent seems to separate the scholar from the mass 
of toilsome men, and he looks down with scorn on the 
smith, the potter, and the weaver, and says with the old 
man in Ecclesiasticus, "All these glory in the work of 
their hands ; but they shall not be sought for in the pub- 
lic council, nor sit high in the congregation ; they shall 
not sit in the judge's seat, nor understand the sentence 
of judgment." But great genius in its highest modes 
unites men ; we feel nearer to one who has it than to 
our mother's son ; he is more we than we are ourselves. 
Hence the popularity of the man of genius. He does 
not separate himself from men, but says, " Suffer little 
children to come unto me, and forbid them not.' 7 " Come 
unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest." " I am not come to be ministered 
unto, but to minister." He goes to the lost sheep. He 
is the good physician to the sick, the friend of publicans 
and sinners. The great genius is the Son of Man. 

Now each great gift is a trust from God. The func- 
tion of the man of great genius is to do for the rest what 
they cannot do for themselves. Every faculty that man 
has is amenable to the conscience and God's law, and is 
to be used for its owner's advantage, but for mankind's 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 97 

behoof not less. The great genius for war is to defend 
his nation, not enslave it and mankind, as the Cgesars and 
Napoleons have done. Whoso has genius for productive 
industry must serve mankind, will he or not, for his inven- 
tion shall one day be the property of all. If a man have 
a genius for acquisition, the commonest in mankind, he is 
bound to use it like a brother, and not like a brute ; and 
what a service he may thus render to mankind by the 
Christian use of his masterly power ! This is an age 
when genius for trade is honored above all other forms. 
Let the trade be a religious sacrament, a communion of 
man with man, for their joint good, not for one man's 
blessing and another's harm. If a man have the mercan- 
tile genius or talent of Girard or Astor, what a debt he 
owes to mankind ! What if Raphael had painted for his 
own eye, and then burned up his pictures ; what if 
Shakespeare had written dramas for his family and a few 
friends ; what if Newton had shown his diagrams and 
calculations to the great gownsmen at Cambridge, and 
then destroyed them ; — it would not be at all more 
selfish than the course of the merchant, scholar, trades- 
man, or politician, who works for himself, and himself 
alone. I wish men knew the true use of great talents, 
the true use of the money they therewith accumulate. 
The function of men of great genius for philosophy, 
letters, art, is to educate mankind. Such a one is to 
point out the errors of the popular creed, and indicate 
new truths. And what immense services have been 
rendered by men of great mind who have devoted their 
energies to this work ; those, for example, who have 
exposed the errors of the Heathen mythology, or those 
who have exposed the follies of the Christian mythology, 
— the Martin Luthers who figured in the sixteenth cen- 
tury, the philosophers and free-thinkers of the seven- 

7 



98 THE NATURE OP MAN. 

teenth. eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Such men 
are sent into the world as soldiers of humanity ; if they 
strike against man, not for man, how great is their con- 
demnation ! There is a long line of men of philosophic 
genius, who have sought to educate the people, to free 
them from superstition, vices of body and spirit, noble 
souls, who in the service of humanity died that you aud I 
might live ; kings and priests burned them at the stake, 
cut off their heads, and over ground once slippery with 
their blood we walk secure. So a man of great poetic 
genius or eloquence, — how much does he owe to man- 
kind ! What if he turns off from humanity's eyes, and 
never sees nor sings the highest word of mankind's joy 
or woe ! We drop a tear on the not religious brow of 
Shakespeare. But when a man dedicates his pen to lust 
and wine, and ribald mock and scoff, it is the greatest 
charity that can say to a Byron, " Neither do I condemn 
thee ; go and sin no more." What evil a wicked man of 
talent, still more of genius, can perpetrate in his age ; 
but what service a man of great poetic genius can ren- 
der ! Milton marred his poetry by that ghastly theology 
which he taught ; no man can love his idea of God. But 
what service he rendered to mankind by his love of 
freedom, and the high, brave morals he taught. How has 
Mr. Wordsworth cultivated the sweetest virtues in his 
garden of the Muses, which is also a garden of Christian 
literature. How much has Mr. Hood done by his two 
songs, " The Song of the Shirt," and " The Bridge of 
Sighs." How much Mr. Dickens has accomplished, with 
this humanity in his great, generous heart. America 
has one man of literary genius, far surpassing all her 
other sons, both philosopher and poet, though with 
something of the lack of the accomplishment of verse ; 
a man who never appeals to a mean motive, who uplifts 



THE NATURE OF MAN. 99 

and inspires, while lie gladdens and bears men heaven- 
ward on his swift, free wings, as white and clean as 
snow. 

The highest of all forms of genius, God's noblest gift, 
is genius for religion, — piety, the ideal love of God ; 
morality, the keeping of every law ; philanthropy, the 
love of men. Hitherto this has been the rarest of gifts. 
But now and then such a one comes up from the instinc- 
tive mass of mankind, an Elias, a Moses, or a Jesus. 

The Greeks had a natural talent for philosophy and 
art, — the genius for science, literature, and beauty of 
old times sloping up towards Aristotle, ^Eschylus, and 
Phidias. The Hebrews had a national talent for religion, 
— no science, no literature like that of the Greeks, no 
art ; but the fruits of their religious consciousness are 
treasured up for all times, sloping up towards the meas- 
ure of the perfect man. Greece bore Homer and Aris- 
totle ; mightiest in science this, chiefest that in song. 
Palestine bore Moses and Jesus, — the last, to my eye, 
the greatest religious genius of all time. Starting from 
Hebrew soil, he roots into the national traditions ; but 
his flower is human substance on the Hebrew stem. He 
shared much of the superstition of his time, its mistaken 
philosophy, its limited notion of God, of man, and of 
the relation between the two ; he taught an eternal 
devil, an angry God, and an endless hell. That was the 
dust of Jerusalem blown into his flower, the eaves-drop- 
ping from the synagogue or temple. But his great 
genius for religion saw religion as love, the mystic love 
within, the active love without. His genius for philos- 
ophy, power of reflection, separated him from the creeds 
of the doctors of law. His genius for humanity, power 
of instinct, made him despise the practice of such as say 
and do not, make long prayers, and devour widows' 



100 THE NATURE OF MAN. 

houses in private. He would have mercy, and not sacri- 
fice. Too far before men for their comprehension, too 
far above them for their sympathy, what could they do 
but crucify him ? The most educated class hated him • 
but " the common people heard him gladly/' — because 
he had the great instinct of humanity in his heart, and 
preached it to their consciousness. Men felt the pres- 
ence of a great man, and with the instinctive loyalty of 
mankind they adorned him with the best they could offer; 
the gewgaws of their fancy they put about his name, 
called him the Son of David, and the Messiah ; told mira- 
cles about him ; nay, the multitude cut down branches 
from the trees, and strewed them, with their garments, 
in the way ; and ere long they called him God. Poor 
Attleborough jewels are all these, but the best that 
humanity could offer. One day mankind will drop these 
fancies, and we shall look on the majestic features of 
that Hebrew man, radiant all over with humanity, and 
speaking still his highest word, — love to God, and love 
to man. All notions of his miraculous conception, birth, 
death, and life, will vanish away, the fancied God give 
place to the real man, and the great services of his 
genius and life be plain to all men. 



man's nature a prophecy of eternal growth. 

I wonder at the beauty of this world. I am amazed 
before a little flakelet of snow, at its loveliness, at the 
strangeness of its geometry, its combination of angles, 
at the marvellous chemistry which brought these curi- 
ous atoms together. I reverence the Infinite God, who 
made the ocean, earth, air, three sister graces, for hand- 
maids to attend this fledgling of the sky. I look up and 






THE NATURE OF MAN. 101 

wonder at the stars ; I am astonished at the beauty of 
that great constellation Orion, which every night unveils 
its majestic forehead to the eyes of men. I study its 
nebula with a telescope, and it resolves itself to stars 
so distant that those mighty orbs seem but flakes of 
cloud to the unassisted eye. In fancy I clothe them with 
verdure, trees of their own, and people them with 
beasts, birds, fishes, insects, and the like. I have confi- 
dence in the laws which lead and guide them, and they 
are a great revelation of the omnipotence of God. But 
I compare them with man, with spirit, its laws, its pow- 
ers, its imperial duration, and its faculty of unbounded 
growth, — and Orion, with its nebula, seen to be stars, 
is as much inferior to man as that snow-flake to the con- 
stellation. And when I reflect upon this world of con- 
sciousness, the powers born in us, — which seem but as 
flakelets of a cloud now, but which, seen through my 
telescopic faith in God, resolve themselves into stars too 
distant to be seen, and only dimly brought to conscious- 
ness in such a soul as Christ's, — then I forget the con- 
stellation and all the starry beauty of the world, forget 
the joy of trust that constellation taught, and find de- 
light in that higher joy and nobler trust which my own 
nature has revealed to me. 



TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS 



OF 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 



THE IMPOKTANCE OF THE INDIVIDUAL MAN. 

IN a crowded city you see the multitude of men 
going to and fro, each on his several errand of busi- 
ness or pleasure ; you see the shops, so busy and so full ; 
the ships, so many and of such great cost, going so far 
and sailing so swift ; you are told so many thousand men 
lodge each night underneath the city roofs, and every 
morning so many thousand more come here to join the 
doing and the driving of the town, and depart thence at 
night. You look at all this manifold doing and driving, 
the great stream of activity that runs up and down the 
streets and lanes, and you think how very unimportant, 
insignificant even, is any one man. Yonder dandy, say 
you, who has just blossomed out of the tailor's window, 
a summer tulip transplanted to the sidewalk, might 
drop through, and never be missed ; so might that little 
shrinking maiden, sober as a violet, going to her work in 
a milliner's or bookbinder's shop. Who would ever miss 
these two grains of dust if they got blown off? You 
think of the conventions to make constitutions, of the 
general assemblies, of the million of men who compose 
Massachusetts, then of the courts and congresses and 
laws of this nation, its three and twenty millions of men, 
— and how insignificant appears the little village we 
102 



HUMAN CHAEACTEE AND CONDUCT. 103 

stand in. You think of the whole world of nations, with 
its fleets, armies, cities, towns, the enormous amount of 
property which belongs to the world, — for mankind is a 
rich old fellow, — you think of all the laws and constitu- 
tions, democratically writ on parchment, or else despot- 
ically incarnated in a Nicholas or a Grand Turk, you 
think of the ten hundred millions of men on the earth, — 
and what is America, the individual nation ? It is one 
drop in the pitcher; it might drop out, and nobody 
would miss it. What is Boston, an individual town ? 
It might cave in to-morrow, and the world care nothing 
for the loss, — only one farthing gone out of the inex- 
haustible riches of the human race. What am I, say 
you, an individual man? I might die outright, and 
what odds would it make to the world ? Of what conse- 
quence is it to mankind that I am faithful or not ? 
whether I sell brandy or bread ? whether I kidnap men 
or make honest neat's leather into honest shoes ? I am 
one hundred and fifty thousandth part of Boston, one 
twenty-three millionth part of America, one thousand 
millionth part of the whole human race ; — what a con- 
temptible vulgar fraction of humanity is that, at its best 
estate ! If all the world of men were brought together, 
who would miss me when the poll of the human race 
was taken ? I shall never much influence the general 
product of mankind, let God add, or subtract, or multi- 
ply, or divide me as he sees fit. What a ridiculous 
figure am I ! I have a few faculties, a little wit, a little 
justice, a small amount of benevolence, reaching to my 
next neighbor, and a little beyond ; a modicum of trust 
in God. What are these amongst so many ? Let me 
give up. Man has no need of this one thousand mil- 
lionth part of the family, and God will never miss me. 



104 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

The individual is nothing in this vast sum of forces, so- 
cial, ecclesiastical, political, and human. 

It does seem so at first. The individual man seems 
of very small consequence ; and so a man loses himself 
in a great city, cares little for his own individuality, and 
is content to be a fraction of the mass ; so much of the 
Whig party, so much of the Democratic party, so much 
of some other party ; a little fraction of America, and a 
little vulgar fraction of the human race. 

When you come home and look into the cradle, or on 
her who sits at its side, when you meet your gray-haired 
father, or your mother venerable and old, when you take 
brother and sister by the hand, or put your arm about 
one best beloved, — then all this is changed, and the 
individual seems of importance, and the greatest mass 
only the tool thereof. "What a nice world it is ! " says 
young Romeo to younger Juliet, as he gives her the first 
evening primrose of the summer. " The world was 
made for you and me/' sweetly coo they to one another, 
" on purpose to produce this very primrose." To each 
Lorenzo, what is all the crowd of Venice, what are its 
palaces and works of art, its laws, or its commercial 
hand that reached through the world, compared with his 
single individual Jessica ? To him they seem but ser- 
vants to attend her. Even the moonlight which " sleeps 
upon the bank," and the " heaven thick inlaid with pat- 
ines of bright gold," seem only designed by Heaven to 
serve and comfort her. " The golden atoms of the day " 
are only powders to enrich her hair. 

When you study the action and the final result of this 
doing and driving in a great busy town like Boston, — 
the shops so many and so full, the ships so costly, going 
so far and so fast, — of the thousands that lodge under 
the roof-tree of the town, and the thousands more that do 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 105 

business in its streets, — when you think of the laws, 
the social and political machinery, and all the riches of 
this wealthy world, — you see that the ultimate function 
of it all is to produce an individual man, and to serve 
him. For this do men build the sovereigns of the seas 
and the kings of the clippers, — enormous ships, nobody 
comprehends how big. Such is the end of all this won- 
derful apparatus, the institutions and customs of the 
community, the constitutions and laws of the state, the 
dogmas and rituals of the church. For this men build 
great halls to regale matron and man and maid with 
music ; for this swells up the great dome of Saint Peter's, 
or Strasburg Cathedral lifts its finger-tower clear up into 
the sky. All is to report its progress, and the final re- 
sult, at the fireside and the cradle, and it is valuable or 
worthless just as it tells in the consciousness and the 
character of the individual man. Even young Mr. Tulip, 
the dandy, is of more consequence than all the gaudy 
garments he has bought at his tailor's ; and modest Miss 
Violet is worth more than all the velvets of Genoa and 
Lyons, all the laces ever made at Mechlin, Brussels, and 
Louvain. They are her tools to serve her ; she is not 
for them. Omnipotence works for every man, age out 
and age in, century after century. Mr. Erskine said the 
highest function of the English Parliament was to put 
twelve honest men in a jury-box. He might have 
brought it to the smallest point, and said the highest 
function of the English Parliament, and every other legis- 
lative and executive body, is to make John and Jane the 
best man and woman it is possible for them to be. 

In looking at great things, at multitudes of men, at the 
great social forces of the world, we forget the importance 
of the individual man, and are content to sacrifice him to 
the great purposes of the human race, or of some nation. 



106 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

Merchants often think it is of no great consequence what 
becomes of the sailors, if trade only flourish. So the 
forecastle may be very unwholesome and narrow, but the 
hold for the goods must be roomy and ventilated well. 
The manufacturer thinks the same of the operative, and 
so sacrifices the human end to the material means. Thus 
it comes to pass that things get in the saddle and ride 
mankind, and man is sacrificed, the individual cut down 
to suit the great commercial interest. The farmer is 
sacrificed to his ditch. His meadow has got anew ditch, 
and he a new rheumatism to remember it by. Here is a 
man of a large pattern, brave and manly by nature, who 
does nothing but buy and sell. He buys and sells all the 
week ; he cannot dine with his wife, sees his children 
only as dogs lap water on the Nile, as quickly as possible, 
fearing the crocodiles will snap them in. On Sunday he 
is getting ready to buy and sell the next morning. He 
has no time to read or think. His fortune goes up, and 
he himself is at the other end of the beam, and goes down 
just in proportion. It is plain that this man practicall\* 
thinks he is of much less importance than his estate ; 
otherwise he would take more pains to be a man than to 
get a million of money, and would know that buying and 
selling and getting a fortune are not the end of human 
life ; they are only the means thereto. 

Napoleon the First was a great man, in the common 
modes of greatness ; a very small man in the modes of 
greatness represented by the blessed soul that fills the 
pages of the New Testament. But what is the best 
thing he could carry out of the world ? Fame he left 
behind him, and it is likely that to-day he has no more 
advantage from his reputation on earth than the sorriest 
ass-driver ever cradled in his native Corsica. The sex- 
ton at Saint Martin tolled the bells of the village at noon 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 107 

on the day when Napoleon wheeled his army round the 
corner of the road that sweeps over the Simplon. The 
jow of the bell went booming up the mountain, and was 
heard a league off, it may be ; and the neat-herd and shep- 
herd, hearing it, said to himself, " Hans and Jean are 
pulling at the rope now. What great men they must be 
to make themselves heard from the parish church, all up 
the mountain, a league round." Napoleon had a reputa- 
tion that filled the world ; every shot from his cannon 
was heard from the North Cape to Gibraltar ; and even 
now his reputation goes round the world. But Hans's 
and Jean's reputation is worth as much to them to-day 
as Napoleon's is to him. His power over men slipped 
through his hands long before death took him, and the 
riches of the man who gave away empires and distribut- 
ed crowns, gave him six cubic feet of earth at last. His 
power, wealth, and fame were only his apparatus for 
manufacturing human character out of human nature. 
The business of Bridget and Rosanna, scrubbing in a 
kitchen, the business of Thomas and Charles, making 
shoes or cutting stone, is the same to them, perhaps of 
quite as much value, as Napoleon's dealing with kings 
was to him. Our special calling, that of cook in the ca- 
boose of a ship, or of king on the throne of Spain, Prus- 
sia, Sweden, is only the frame on which we stretch out 
the blank canvas of human nature, thereon to work out 
such a pattern of ideal character as we will or can. One 
day Death passes by the window; I look out, he sees 
me ; the frame breaks to pieces, the web floats out, and 
goes up to God, carrying therewith my work, well done 
or ill done, bad pattern or good one, as I have made. 
The frame is all gone, only the pattern ascends. Amos 
and Robert go out of the world, leaving millions of money 
and a high name. John and Hannah will one day depart, 



108 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

leaving no millions of money, no great name ; but the 
Great Divine Providence will ask the same question of 
each one of the four, — " What are you, my little child ? 
How faithful have you been to your individual soul and 
material circumstances? What have you made out of 
these things that I gave you ? " That will alike be asked 
of Imperial Nicholas and the man who polishes his boots: 
and the shoe-brush may do for one of them what the 
sceptre does for the other. God is no respecter of either ; 
he takes the character, achieved by the use of the one 
or the bearing of the other, asking no questions beyond 
that. 

Great Michael Angelo, out of Parian stone or Carrara 
marble, sculptured many a statue, which stands or sits 
there at Florence to astonish beholders, — his Dead 
Christ, made for a pope ; his Horned Moses, made for 
some cardinal ; his Day and Night, for the republic of 
Florence.. But there was another statue that Michael 
was all the while carving and working out, day out and 
day in, sculptured out of spirit, and not marble ; and that 
was Michael himself. He made it for no pope, no cardi- 
nal, no republic of Florence ; he made it for himself and 
his God, and carried it home with him to the kingdom of 
Heaven. You and I, working in our several spheres, 
may do the same work, and, toiling for earth, toil also for 
heaven ; and every day's work may be a Jacob's ladder 
reaching up nearer to our God. 



CHARACTER. 



Look at this young man. He is building up his for- 
tune, and that is all men see, and they praise that, and 
say he is an industrious and excellent man, and will prob- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 109 

ably be rich. I see and respect all that for what it 
is worth. But behind his fortune there is rising up his 
character, stone upon stone,, brick upon brick, story after 
story ; and by and by that will be accomplished, and the 
great angel Death will come and pull down that scaffold- 
ing, and it will lie there, useful once, but idle rubbish 
now, and there will stand, resting on the rock of ages 
and reaching far up into the heavens, the great brave 
character which the man has built in the everlasting sun- 
light of God, itself as everlasting, and always as fair. 



HUMAN WELFARE. 



I have often wondered that men who are so greedy 
for pleasure, and spend so much time in making ready 
what they reckon the outward means of happiness, 
getting money, reputation, office, did not look a little 
deeper, and see on what ultimate conditions human 
welfare might be had, even the highest human welfare. 
Merchants sending out adventures to Manilla or to 
Nootka 'Sound make diligent inquiry as to the things 
needful for the voyage, and the special merchandise 
which they will venture there. Their success is not 
all luck ; nay, luck is the smallest part of it. It is the 
result of good sense applied to trade. Send a ship 
adrift anywhere into the ocean, with any thing thrust 
on board, it does not bring back a good return. A 
gardener, seeking to rear flowers and fruits, hunts the 
wide world over so as to get the fairest and the sweet- 
est. Then he studies the habits of every plant, learning 
the conditions of its being, and its well-being ; he fits 
the sun and soil thereunto, and rears his magnolia, his 



110 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

Amazonian lily, his peach, his strawberry, his pear, his 
grape, his plum. 

Why should not you and I likewise study the means 
by which the highest human blessedness is to be had, 
be as careful merchants of happiness as of wheat and 
bricks and hemp ? And why should we not plant gar- 
dens of delight as well as gardens of daisies and of 
.corn ? I have often wondered that men who study 
many a science do not study the science of human 
welfare ; and that such as love art, and would give the 
world, if they had it, t° paint Nature as she is, or to 
sculpture a man as he should be, do not study this, 
which is the loveliest of the fine arts, the art of con- 
structing human blessedness. If thoughtful men took 
as much pains with the voyage through time as the 
voyage over the waters to Nootka Sound or Manilla, 
if they were as careful of this great garden of human 
life, where man is the plant, as they are of kitchen 
gardens and flower gardens and nurseries, — why, what 
a happy world we might have of it here ! And what a 
great horticultural exhibition of human blessedness we 
might have, — not every Saturday, as the gardeners' 
society, but every day, summer and winter, and all the 
year round. 



THE COMMON OCCUPATIONS OF LIFE TO BE HONORED. 

The common callings of the mass of men are the 
means whereby this great Son of God, Mankind, the real 
Christ that abideth ever, enters upon his estate, and 
gets the mastery of the world. To me therefore these 
occupations of every day are what the vast forces which 
we name gravitation, electricity, vegetation, and life are. 
A woman with a broom, and cradle, a needle, a basket- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. Ill 

full of kitchen tools, and a few dollars' worth of other 
furniture and grocer's wares, pursuing her housewifery, 
and making home pleasant, and life clean and sweet 
to herself, to her husband, children, brothers, sisters, 
friends, — is to me a spectacle that is admirable and 
delight'ful ; ay, it is sublime. Feeding the body, edu- 
cating the spirit, and helping humankind to get the 
mastery over the world, she is weaving that Jacob's 
ladder whereby mankind and womankind are climbing 
up to God. There is a sublimity in common things, even 
in what we call vulgar. Nay, it is not the exceptional 
things in life which are the noblest. It is the every - 
day's march of men like you and me ; not the high lift 
or the sudden spring of rare and exceptional persons. 
How we prize the relics of exceptional men, — an ink- 
stand of Lord Byron, a pen of Walter Scott, the sword 
of Oliver Cromwell. But to me the tools which a man 
works with have a certain sanctity and venerableness ; 
the hod of the laborer, the smith's forge-hammer, par- 
take of these. A wheelwright's son in Old England 
once became Archbishop of Canterbury ; and in his 
library he kept a carriage wheel which his own hands 
had made in his youth, and he counted it as an honorable 
scutcheon, and showed it as that great man's coat of 
arms. He never did a wiser nor a sublimer thing. But 
how rarely do we see this. It is only great and excep- 
tional men who are commonly thought to have lofty and 
dignified vocations ; and the rest follow what are called 
" humble callings." But the civilized world, with its 
palaces, its libraries, its academies of science, and its 
galleries of art, rests on the solid shoulders of farmers 
and mechanics. Let them withdraw, and it is as if 
gravitation itself had given out in the centre of the 
world, and it would die of collapse. Sublimity looks 



112 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

very gay at a distance ; you come near, and you find 
its garments are of coarse stuff; and it wears a hair 
shirt next to its skin. 



The lottery of honest labor, drawn by Time, is the 
only one whose prizes are worth taking up and carrying 
home. 



Industry is the business of man. It is a dignity, and 
only idleness a disgrace, a wrong, and curse. If you 
earn nothing by head or hand, heart or soul, then you 
are, and must be, a beggar or a thief, and neither 
pay for your board nor lodging. 



FRIVOLITY. 

I do not know which is the saddest sight to see, — 
the house-breaker and the harlot in jail, or the frivolous 
voluptuary in his saloon or coach. I do not know which 
is the saddest tale to read, — the Court Journal, or the 
reports of trials of criminals. I do not know which is 
the worst. One is the earnestness of rage and want 
and lust : the other is the frivolity of the vain and the 
foolish. At one extreme of society, idlers, loungers, 
careless creatures there are, as heedless as flies, and as 
inert for any work, — the golden flies of wealth, who 
live and move and have their ephemeral being in a 
whisper of fashion. At the other end of society there 
are persons squalid and clad in rags, who are harvested 
by death from day to day, and who are just as idle, just 
as incompetent for any work. They swarm in the low 
parts of this city, wholly incapable of any effort. No 
summer wave dashes more frivolous than they. On both 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 113 

of these classes the philosophical philanthropist gazes 
with folded arms, — for here is an evil which Orpheus 
might have sung to, which Moses might have thundered 
and lightened upon, and which Jesus might have prayed 
for, all in vain. He can only fold his arms, and wait 
for the great teacher Death, who to the little and great 
laggard of frivolity will teach the same lesson, from 
which there is no escape in either extreme of human 
life. Here are these two exceptional classes of men ; 
but the great mass of the people never reach either of 
these extremes. The dregs and the foam of the cup 
of human life differ very widely from the wine which 
lies between. 



EARNESTNESS. 

It is a sad sight to see a man specially earnest in his 
business, but a frivolous fop in every thing besides, and 
in morals and religion a mere scorner. One day the 
echo of his mockery will come back to the walls of 
the world which he has defiled, and ring through his 
house, which will seem the poorer because it is rich, 
and emptier because it is so full of merely worldly 
wealth. If the business of life be not merely to gather 
gold and live easy, but also to be a man, having a four- 
fold manly life in you, — having wisdom, justice, love, 
and faith in God, and so attaining the measure of a 
Christian man, then you must not only be earnest in 
business, but have a general earnestness of spirit in all 
that concerns your inner life. Then sometimes in our 
life it may be a serious question for us to ask, " What 
are we now, and what are we doing in our life ? Do 
we live the earnest life of the Christian man, or the 
mean beggarly life of nothing but the flesh ? " That 



114 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

question may well take the rose out of the young 
maiden's or young man's cheek, and the thought of 
it make the old man turn pale. But if you respect 
yourself, and know you are here to become a man, then 
howsoever frivolous in trifles, you will never be frivo- 
lous in what regards the integrity of your own soul ; 
but be ready to divest yourself of the respect of men, 
to strip yourself of property, if need be, in order that 
you may be faithful to your spirit. 

You may have a general frivolity of character and 
be a fop, a man fop or a woman fop ; not of dress or 
manners only, but in your whole life. With a special 
earnestness you may get gain and station. But to be a 
man, to be a Christian, you must have a general earnest- 
ness of character, and lay a special emphasis on what 
concerns your higher needs, your conscience, your 
heart, and your soul. Then all this grave serenity of 
the heavens above us, of earth under our feet, of ocean 
that rolls against the land, will serve as allies in our 
behalf; and all the events of the world, the rise and 
fall of states, the temptation of business, the temptation 
of politics, the temptation of the church, — all these 
will be only instruments to help us forward in our 
march towards manhood, and to make us yet more 
manly and Christian men. 



KNOW-NOTHINGS. 



In the town of SomeAvhere lives Mr. Manygirls. He 
is a toilsome merchant, his wife a hard-working house- 
keeper. Once they were poor, now they are ruinously 
rich. They have seven daughters, whom they train up 
in utter idleness. They are all do-nothings. They 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 115 

spend much money, but not in works of humanity, not 
even in elegant accomplishments, in painting, dancing, 
music, and the like, so paying in spiritual beauty what 
they take in material use. They never read nor sing ; 
they are know-nothings, and only walk in a vain show, 
as useless as a ghost, and as ignorant as the block 
on which their bonnets are made. Now, these seven 
" ladies " — as the newspapers call the poor things, so 
insignificant and helpless — are not only idle, earning 
nothing, but they consume much. What a load of finery 
is on their shoulders and heads and necks ! Mr. Many- 
girls hires many men and women to wait on his daugh- 
ters' idleness, and these servants are withdrawn from 
the productive work of the shop or the farm, and set to 
the unproductive work of nursing these seven great 
grown-up babies. 

On the other side of the way, the Hon. Mr. Manyboys 
has seven sons, who are the exact match, of the mer- 
chant's daughters, — rich, idle, some of them dissolute, 
debauchery coming before their beard, all useless, earn- 
ing nothing, spending much and wasting more. Their 
only labor is to kill time, and in summer they emigrate 
from pond to pond, from lake to lake, having a fishing 
line with a worm at one end, and a fool at the other. 

These are the " first families " in Somewhere. Their 
idleness is counted pleasure ; the opinion of these know- 
nothings is thought wisdom ; their example fashion ; 
their life the reward of their fathers' toil. Six of these 
sons will marry, and five, perhaps, of Mr. Manygirls' 
daughters ; and what families they will found, to live 
idly on the toil of their grandfathers' bones, until a com- 
mercial crisis, or the wear and tear of time, has dissi- 
pated their fortune, and they are forced, reluctantly, to 
toil! 



116 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OP 

LIVES OF PLEASURE. 

I recommend no sour and ascetic life. I believe not 
only in the thorns on the rose-bush, but in the roses 
which the thorns defend. Asceticism is the child of 
Sensuality and Superstition. She is the secret mother 
of many a secret sin. God, when he made man's body, 
did not give us a fibre too much nor a passion too many. 
I would steal no violet from the young maiden's bosom ; 
rather would I fill her arms with more fragrant roses. 
But a life merely of pleasure, or chiefly of pleasure, is 
always a poor and worthless life, not worth the living ; 
always unsatisfactory in its course, always miserable in 
its end. Read the literature of such men, from Anacreon 
of old to Anacreon Moore of our times, and it is the 
most unsatisfactory literature in the world. There is 
the banquet, and the wine circles, and the flowers are 
gay ; but behind all these is the emblematic coffin, and 
the skeleton stands there to scare the man from his roses 
and his cups. No lamentations of Jeremiah are to me 
so sad as the literature of pleasure. It is well to be 
ascetic sooner than waste your life in idle joys. The 
earnestness of life is the only passport to the satisfac- 
tion of life. 



THE QUALITY OF PLEASURE. 



Let amusements fill up the chinks of your existence, 
not the great spaces thereof. Let your pleasures be 
taken as Daniel took his prayer, with his windows open 
— pleasures which need not cause a single blush on an 
ingenuous cheek. 



" That which must be concealed is near allied to sin." 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 117 

Heed the quality of your joy. A single rose is a fairer 
ornament than a whole stack of straw. 



HUMAN WRECKS. 



Think of a young man growing up, conquered by hi? 
appetites, — the soul overlaid by the body, the smutcl 
of shame on all the white raiment of God's youthful son, 
who can stoop the pride of his youth so low, and be a 
triner, a drunkard, a debauchee ! The mind of man de- 
spises it, and woman's holy soul casts it aside with 
scorn. Stern as you may think me, and stern I surely 
am, I can only weep at such decay as this, — flowers 
trod down by swine, the rainbow broken by the storm, 
the soul prostrate, and trampled by the body's cruel 
hoof. 



RETRIBUTION. 

No man ever sacrificed his sense of right to any thing, 
to lust of pleasure, lust of money, lust of power, or lust 
of fame, but the swift feet of Justice overtook him. She 
held her austere court within his soul, conducted the 
trial, passed sentence, and performed the execution. It 
was done with closed doors; nobody saw it, only that 
unslumbering Eye, and that man's heart. Nay, perhaps 
the man felt it not himself, but only shrunk and shriv- 
elled, and grew less and less, one day to fall, with lum- 
bering crash, a ruin to the ground. 



118 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OP 

TEMPTATION OF THE DEVIL. 

Jesus had his temptation in the wilderness, says the 
New- Testament story. No doubt it was so. But he 
had it in the city also, in house, and shop, and every- 
where else. When the devil finds us in the wilderness, 
and single-handed meets us, the devil alone, and we 
alone, he is not much of a devil, he is not hard to put to 
rout. But the great temptation of the devil is when he 
is backed by interest or fashion, and meets us not alone, 
but in the crowd. There is small cause to fear the 
devil when we meet him alone, but the devil well 
attended by respectable gentlemen, — that is the devil 
who is alarming. The devil who lies in ambush under 
the counter, who skulks behind a bale of cotton, or rings 
money in your car, or rustles gay garments, — that is 
the dangerous devil, and fortunate is he who sees him 
fall as lightning from heaven. Nay, that is the kind that 
goeth not out but by manly prayer and manly work. 



The whole sum and substance of human history may 
be reduced to this maxim, — that when man departs 
from the divine means of reaching the divine end, he 
suffers harm and loss. 



MANHOOD LOST OR WON IN MATERIAL PURSUITS. 

How many men of business do I know whose manhood 
is so overlaid with work that they can do no more. " I 
will have an estate," says one, " and then I can ride on 
it and get my manhood." But, alas ! it is the estate 
which rides him, and not he who rides, horsed on his for- 
tune. This carpenter looks to me like a chip or shaving 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 119 

of humanity, and I sometimes think he will one day 
change into a piece of wood. That stone-mason seems 
to be in the process of petrifying. Here is a New-Eng- 
land lumberman, who deals in logs, thinks of logs, and 
dreams of boards, planks, joists, and scantlings. He 
might make out of his logs a plank-road, and ride easily 
on towards the kingdom of heaven ; nay, he might con- 
struct a commodious bridge to carry him over many a 
deep gulf in that road ; but instead of these, they are 
only a pile of lumber. So he goes on. He is a log on 
the stream, floating towards the sea of wealth, slippery, 
unlovely to look upon, and hopes to reach that end. By 
and by Death makes a long arm, and catches our float- 
ing log, and he stops on the shore to perish in material 
rot. Yonder mother has become a child-keeper, and no 
more. She has been that so long that her specialty of 
business has run away with the universality of the 
woman; she is a mother, nurse, housekeeper, that is all; 
mother of bodies, housekeeper to the flesh, nurse to mat- 
ter, not to the soul that she has cradled in her arms. 
There goes a lawyer who seems to be made of cunning. 
He is an attorney at law ; he might also have been a 
man at law, but he scorned it, and as I look at him the 
inner comes outward to my eye, and his face seems only 
a parchment, and thereon is engrossed a deed of sale, so 
much for so much. 

It is very sad for a man to make himself servant to a 
thing, his manhood all taken out of him by the hydraulic 
pressure of excessive business ; but how common it is ! 
I should not like to be merely a great doctor, a great 
lawyer, a great minister, a great politician, I should like 
to be also something of a man. 

Sometimes this excessive devotion to business is a 
man's misfortune, and not at all his fault. Poverty com- 



120 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

pels the sacrifice of himself; and in such a case, let us 
not condemn hini, but pity the condition, and venerate 
the person. It has sometimes happened that a man or 
woman must forego that nice culture which nature de- 
manded, and devote all the time to the support of father, 
mother, brother, or family. It is more frequently so 
with women than men, for the great burden of humanity 
has often been laid upon the shoulders that were fee- 
blest to bear it. Most men fail of their moral develop- 
ment by the attempt to extend their own self too far, 
most women by attempting to contract it too much. 
Man's selfishness brings him to the ground ; woman goes 
astray through her self-denial. There are many persons 
whom we must look upon as the slain and crippled of 
war, who are not the victims of cannon-shot and bullets, 
for the battle of industry has also its martyrs. 

Sometimes this is a man's fault, not his misfortune. 
He had his choice, and chose money, office, reputation, 
rather than manhood. To me this is a sadder sight than 
to see a man stricken on the red field of hostile strife. 
I mourn over a man whom violence has deprived of his 
manhood ; but he will recover that on the other side of 
the grave. Still more do I mourn over one who has 
turned traitor against himself, and plundered his own 
soul of his manhood. If men or women determine to 
seek in daily life only its material result, they become 
tools of business, not also men and women at their sev- 
eral callings. But if a farmer will take the same pains 
to raise character as corn, if the mechanic will manufac- 
ture justice, benevolence, faith in God, such shall be his 
return. If the trader, in buying and selling, wishes to 
deal in " charities that heal and soothe and bless," they 
shall be u scattered at the good man's feet like flowers." 
Would he traffic in the "primal virtues," they shall 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 121 

" shine aloft as stars V which never set. A glorious 
character is worth whole crystal palaces crowded full of 
material riches and beauty. Yonder tailor is making 
garments for immortal life, — clothing you and me with 
coats, but himself with an angePs robe. That shoemaker 
who sits in his shop, drawing his quarters and sole to- 
gether, is shod with the sandals of salvation, that will not 
wear out in life's slippery road. This good silversmith 
is making nothing so fair as his own character; there 
is no jewel that gleams with such a sparkle in his 
windows. That carpenter is making cabinet-work for 
heaven. This dealer in lumber has logs that form into a 
great ship of life, to carry him over the sea of time, and 
put him on the " Islands of the Blest." That cook, 
feeding her household, is getting angePs bread for her 
own soul. Yonder housekeeper, careful and troubled 
about many things, has yet the one thing needful, and 
that good part which shall not be taken from her. This 
mother, rocking her baby's cradle, is training up her 
own soul for immortal life. How rich human nature is, 
how profitable daily life may be, how joyous its spirit- 
ual delights ! 

Let us do our duty in our shop, or our kitchen, the 
market, the street, the office, the school, the home, just 
as faithfully as if we stood in the front rank of some 
great battle, and we knew that victory for mankind 
depended on our bravery, strength, and skill. When we 
do that, the humblest of us will be serving in that great 
army which achieves the welfare of the world. 



Sometimes we say, This thing is not right, but it will 
do in the long-run. How far can you and I see ? The 



122 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

best only a hand-bread tb. How clearly ? But with 
exceeding dimness. We say it will last our time, and 
so serve our purpose. Is it not worth while -to remem- 
ber that our time, after all, is eternity ? 



AMOS LAWRENCE. 



Two days ago there died in this city a man rich in 
money, but far more rich in manhood. I suppose he had 
his faults, his deformities of character. Of course he 
had. It takes many men to make up a complete man. 
Humanity is so wide and deep that all the world cannot 
drink it dry. 

He came here poor, from a little country town. He 
came with nothing — nothing but himself, I mean ; and 
a man is not appraised, only taxed. He came obscure ; 
nobody knew Amos Lawrence forty-five years ago, nor 
cared whether the handkerchief in which he carried his 
wardrobe, trudging to town, was little or large. He 
acquired a large estate ; got it by industry, forecast, 
prudence, thrift, — honest industry, forecast, prudence, 
thrift. He earned what he got, and a great deal more. 
He was proud of his life, honorably proud that he had 
made his own fortune, and started with "nothing but his 
hands." Sometimes he took gentlemen to Groton, and 
showed them half a mile of stone wall which the boy 
Amos had laid on the paternal homestead. That was 
something for a rich merchant to be proud of. 

He knew what few men understand, — when to stop 
accumulating. At the age when the summer of passion 
has grown cool, and the winter of ambition begins 
seriously to set in ; when avarice, and love of power, of 
distinction, and of office, begin to take hold of men, 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 123 

when the leaves of instinctive generosity fall off, and the 
selfish bark begins to tighten about the man, — some 
twenty years ago, when he had acquired a large estate, 
he said to himself, " Enough ! No more accumulation of 
that sort to make me a miser, and my children worse 
than misers." So he sought to use nobly what he had 
manfully won. He didn't keep 

" A brave old house, at a bountiful rate, 

With half a score of servants to wait at the gate." 

He lived comfortably, but discreetly. 

His charity was greater than his estate. In the last 
twenty or thirty years he has given away to the poor a 
larger fortune than he has left to his family. But he 
gave with as much wisdom as generosity. His money 
lengthened his arm, because he had a good heart in his 
bosom. He looked up his old customers, whom he had 
known in his poor days, which were their rich ones, 

— and helped them in their need. He sought the poor 
of this city and its neighborhood, and gave them his 
gold, his attention, and the sympathy of his honest heart. 
He prayed for the poor, but he prayed gold. He built 
churches, — not for his own sect alone, for he had piety 
without narrowness, and took religion in a natural way ; 

— churches for Methodists, Baptists, Calvinists, Unita- 
rians, for poor, oppressed black men, fugitive slaves in 
Canada ; nay, more, he helped them in their flight. He 
helped colleges, — gave them libraries and philosoph- 
ical apparatus. He sought out young men of talents 
and character, but poor, and struggling for education, 
and made a long arm to reach down to their need, send- 
ing parcels of books, pieces of cloth to make a scholar's 
jacket or cloak, or money to pay the term-bills. He lent 
money, when the loan was better than the gift. That 



124 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

bountiful hand was felt on the shore of the Pacific. 
He was his own executor, and the trustee of his own 
charity-funds. He did not leave it for his heirs to dis- 
tribute his benevolence at their cost ; at his own cost he 
administered the benefactions of his testament. At the 
end of a fortunate year he once found thirty thousand 
dollars more than he had looked for, as his share of the 
annual profits. In a month he had invested it all — in 
various charities. He could not eat his morsel alone, 
the good man. 

His benevolence came out also in smaller things in 
his daily life. He let the boys cling on behind his car- 
riage, — grown men did so, but invisibly ; he gave 
sleigh-rides to boys and girls, and had a gentle word and 
kindly smile for all he met. 

He coveted no distinction. He had no title, and was 
not a " General," a " Colonel," a " Captain," or " Honor- 
able," — only plain " Mister," " Esquire," and " Deacon " 
at the end. 

His charity was as unostentatious as the dew in sum- 
mer. Blessing the giver by the motive, the receiver 
by the quicker life and greener growth, it made no noise 
in falling to the ground. In Boston, — which suspicious- 
ly scrutinizes righteousness with the same eye which 
blinks at the most hideous profligacy, though as public 
as the street, — even the daily press never accused his 
charity of loving to be looked at. 

Of good judgment, good common sense, careful, exact, 
methodical, diligent, he was not a man of great intellect. 
He had no uncommon culture of the understanding or 
the imagination, and of the higher reason still less. But 
in respect of the greater faculties, — in respect of con- 
science, affection, the religious element, — he was well 
born, well bred, eminently well disciplined by himself. 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 125 

He was truly a religious man. I do not mean to say 
he thought as Calvin or Luther thought, or believed by 
Peter, James, or John. Perhaps he believed some 
things which the apostles never thought of, and rejected 
others which they all had in reverence. When I say 
that he was a religious man, I mean that he loved God 
and loved men. He had no more doubt that God would 
receive him to heaven than that he himself would make 
all men happy if he could. Reverencing God, he rever- 
enced the laws of God; — I mean the natural laws of 
morality, the laws of justice and of love. His religion 
was not ascetic, but good-natured, and of a cheerful 
countenance. His piety became morality. The first 
rule he took to his counting-house was the Golden Rule ; 
he never laid it by, — buying and selling and giving by 
that standard measure. So he travelled along, on that 
path which widens and brightens as it leads to heaven. 

Here was a man who knew the odds between the 
means of living and the ends of life. He knew the true 
use of riches. They served as a material basis for great 
manly excellence. His use of gold was a power to 
feed, to clothe, to house, and warm, and comfort, needy 
men ; a power to educate the mind, to cheer the affec- 
tions, to bless the soul ! To many a poor boy, to many 
a sad mother, he gave a " Merry Christmas " on the 
earth, and now, in due time, God has taken him to cele- 
brate Epiphany and New-Year's Day in heaven ! 



Every vice meets its own terrific punishment. What 
if the Honorable Mr. Devil does keep his coach and six? 
It is Mr. Devil who rides in it still, and no six horses 
will ever carry him away from himself. What if the 
young men invite him to sit on their platforms, and so 



1-6 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

do him honor? It only exhibits his devilship before the 
people in that high seat — his character published in 
the great niagnifying-glass that is before him. He had 
better have shrunk into the lowest corner. 



CONTRASTS. 

See what strange contrasts come to pass in our Chris- 
tian democracy — so called. I do not refer to particu- 
lar cases, but what happens every year, and many times 
a year. Here is a bridal party, among the wealthiest of 
a great city. All the riches of food, furniture, and fash- 
ion which gold can purchase are here brought together. 
Here is the highest result of New-England civilization, 
the millionnaires of money and of mind. The intellect- 
ual butterfly always loves to bask and sun himself in 
the golden gleam of wealth. The mechanics who built 
the house where they are gathered never saw the inside 
after the key was turned and given to the owner. The 
hodmen who bore the bricks up the tall ladder could not 
read the Lord's Prayer, nor write their names. The 
mariners who on the ocean sail the merchant-ships, and 
bring home the costly wares which go to the furnishing 
of the house and its inmates, are rude and ignorant men, 
who have only a brief wrestle with the triumphant ele- 
ments under which perhaps they at last go down. The 
vine-dresser on the Rhine who carried the filthiest sub- 
stances in a basket on his back up the steep terraces, to 
nourish the choice vintage that produced the wedding 
wine, is as ignorant as the hodman, and does not know 
whether Boston is in the United States, or the United 
States in Boston. What beauty of dress there is ; but 
think of the Irish women who dressed the flax at four- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 127 

pence a day, finding their own food and lodging. Think 
of the lace-weavers at Brussels, who sit in cold and moist 
apartments, — for otherwise the thread so attenuated 
cannot be drawn out, — so damp that consumption rides 
in the air, and mows down his victims in four or five 
years. Think of the velvet-makers at Lyons, toiling on 
starvation-wages for a single New-England shilling a day ; 
yet men of better culture of intellect than the wearers 
of the garments oftentimes. Think of the bridal veil, 
the cost of which would have supported Bowditch or 
Franklin at Amherst College for a whole year. " Stiff 
with lavish costliness," it is worn by one who never 
earned a farthing, and never will. Think of 

" The girl whose fingers thin 
Wove the weary broidery in, 
Bending backward from her toil, 
Lest her tears the work should spoil, 
Shaping from her bitter thought 
Heart's-ease and Forget-me-not." 

Think of the history of the cotton, every fibre of it the 
toil of a slave ; of the sugar-work of the confectioner, 
every crystal of it pressed out of the Indian cane by a 
slave. Consider the work of the painter on the wall, 
who toiled in a garret at Rome, having nothing to com- 
fort him but his God and his art, who at last dies of 
genius and starvation, unpitied, unlamented, and all alone. 
Consider the gay entertainment, and the rude ill-paid per- 
sons who made it, — and the tragic face of Want looks 
out from the comic mask of modern wealth. There you 
see a fair picture of civilization. You see that its most 
coveted results are shared by very few, though produced 
at an immense cost to mankind. 



128 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL RICHES. 

It is not worth while to hold the raiment above the 
body, and the meat more than the soul which should con- 
sume it. The millionuaire is not the highest product of 
human civilization. A rich man, a rich city, does not 
necessarily possess all the Christian virtues. " Money 
answereth all things/' says the Bible proverb ; but it can- 
not answer for honesty, it will never do for virtue, it can- 
not take the place of confidence in thy higher law, thou 
Father of earth and heaven ! Is our trade conducted on 
fair, just principles ? Does the Golden Rule lie on the 
merchant's desk, measuring out between man and man 
the rule of the market ? Have we not forgotten God's 
higher law ? Certainly, we over-rate wealth to-day, just 
as our fathers thought too much of fighting. The great 
end of business is not the accumulation of property, but 
the formation of character. " He heapeth up riches, and 
knoweth not who shall gather them," says the Psalmist ; 
but great virtues, — prudence, wisdom, justice, benevo- 
lence, piety, — these may be gathered from your trade ; 
they are not uncertain riches, but imperishable, undefiled, 
and they fade not away. 



Nature has dreadful whips for men who are seduced 
by pleasure, refined or gross, drawn away from the 
school-house and work-shop of duty, playing truant, idling 
away time and life. Trouble comes to bring them back. 
That great sheep-dog lies near by the flock ; huge, 
shaggy, red-eyed, wide-mouthed, with mighty jaws, he is 
never far away. 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 129 

SILENT WITNESSES. 

" Joseph is a good boy/'' says his mother, " he never 
threw a stone at the pigeons before. You did not mean 
to hit them, did you, dear ? " It is the mother's only son, 
and he never did a naughty thing. But I notice that all 
the hens and turkeys about the house run off when he 
draws near, and that the great speckled cockerel never 
crows till that little imp has gone by ; and that when he 
walks through the pastures all the cows keep at a safe 
distance. These witnesses were not summoned, but they 
came into court of their own accord, and their testimony 
convicts the mother's little darling, who " never threw a 
stone at a pigeon before." 



Wealth and want equally harden the heart, as frost 
and fire are both alike alien to the human flesh. Famine 
and gluttony alike drive nature away from the heart of 
man. 



THE MODERN DEVIL. 

The mythological devil of times past has almost van- 
ished from the earth. We rarely hear of him now. But 
the real devil of our time — what is that ? Yery differ- 
ent is he from our fathers' devil, who was afraid of a 
church in daylight, and slunk off, and was afraid to look 
at a Bible. The modern New-England devil is respecta- 
ble, and does all things decently and in order. His brutal 
hoofs and savage horns and beastly tail are all there, 
only discreetly hid under a dress which any gentleman 
might wear. They do not appear in his body, but in his 
face ; you can see them there, though he does not mean 

9 



130 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

you should. He rides in the streets, and appears at pub- 
lic meetings, and presides, at least is one of the Vice- 
Presidents. He is always on the side of the majority, 
or means to be. He does not like the majority, but he 
likes their power ; he loves nobody but himself. He has 
large understanding, not large reason or imagination ; 
has no wisdom, but a deal of cunning. He has great 
power of speech, and can argue your heart out of your 
bosom. He cares nothing for truth, only for the coun- 
terfeit of truth. He is well educated ; knows as much 
as it is profitable for the devil to know, not truth, but 
plausible lies. He knows most men are selfish, and thinks 
all are. He knows men are fond of pleasure in youth, 
and power in age, and that they can be cheated and 
wheedled, most of them. That is the chief philosophy 
the New-England devil knows, all he wishes to know. 
He is cruel, sly, has a good deal of power to manage men, 
to suit his burdens to their shoulders. He thinks piety 
and goodness are nonsense ; he never says so. His re- 
ligion is church-going, — for now the devil has learned 
a trick worth two of his old ones. He is always in his 
pew, with a neat Bible nicely clasped, with a cross on 
the side of it, — for he is not afraid of the cross, as the 
old devil was. He fixes his cold, hard eye on the minis- 
ter, and twists his mouth into its Sunday contortions. 
He has read the Bridgewater Treatises, and Paley's The- 
ology and Morality ; he knows the " Evidences " like a 
Doctor of Divinity, and he must not doubt the casting of 
the devils into the swine, — nor would you doubt it if 
you saw him ; he knows God commanded Abraham to 
sacrifice Isaac, and that it was his duty to do it. He is 
a life-member of the Bible Society, takes tracts without 
stint, and reads the theological journals as Job's leviathan 
swallowed the water. He sees no evil in slavery ; it is 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 131 

a patriarchal institution, a divine ordinance, useful to 
Christianize the world. Pauperism is not to be found 
fault with; that also is divine, — for did not Jesus say, 
" The poor have ye always with you " ? 

" Yet he is always found 
Among your ten and twenty pound subscribers, 
Your benefactors in the newspapers." 

Sometimes he writes a book on Religion. He is often 
with the minister, attends all the ordinances of religion, 
and every form of sacrament ; pays bountiful pew-taxes ; 
all his children are baptized with water. The minister 
thinks he is the very Evangelist, the chief pillar of his 
church, and wonders why he was not a clergyman, but 
concludes that he thought he could do more good in a 
broader field. He loves to have the minister preach on 
doctrines ; against Jews, Infidels, Transcendentalists, and 
other heathens ; to have him preach on the Bible, on the 
Beauty of Holiness, on Salvation by Faith (and without 
works) — a very dear doctrine ; on the necessity and ad- 
vantages of Revelation, on the Miracles, on the Blessed- 
ness of the Righteous. But let not the minister demand 
righteousness of his parish, nor insist on piety in the 
young man's bosom, or the old man's heart. Let him 
never rebuke a sin that is popular, never differ from 
popular opinion, popular law, popular charity, popular 
religion. It will hurt his usefulness, and injure his repu- 
tation, and persons will not go to his church. Our 
church-going devil has no belief in God, man, or his own 
immortality. He has no truth, justice, love, and faith, 
and is all the worse because he seems to have them ; and 
so he wants morality, but no justice ; society, but no 
love ; a Church with no righteousness on man's part, and 
none on God's part; religion without piety and good- 



132 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

ness ; he wants a minister to manage a machine. " There 
is no higher law/' says he to the minister ; " we must 
keep the laws of the land, — except the laws against 
usury, intemperance, gambling, and the law demanding 
you shall pay your proportion of the taxes ; these laws 
were made for poor men, not for us." And our devil 
with his horns smites down the poor, and with his hoofs 
breaks them into fragments, and with his tail sweeps 
them away. 

This is the devil of our times. He worships the trinity 
of money, the gold eagle, the silver dollar, and the cop- 
per cent, — his triune god. He goes about seeking 
whom he may devour, transformed into a Pharisee. He 
meets lads at college, and breathes into their ears, and 
the leprous shell of the hunker grows over the sopho- 
more. Then farewell to your manhood, young man ! 
The devil has made out your diploma, and you will die 
in your contracting shell. So the Mexican robbers meet 
a man, plunder him, and then sew him up in the skin of 
an ox, newly killed for that purpose ; the supple skin fits 
closely to the man's form, and in that fiery sun it dries 
and contracts, and kills him with a thirsty and lingering 
and horrid death. 

Our Yankee devil meets girls at school, and pours his 
leprous distilment into their ears. Then farewell con- 
science, poor maiden ! The roses may bloom on your 
cheek, but religion is out of your heart ; decency is to 
be your morality. You may marry, but you must never 
love ; and if you do, only with your flesh, for you have 
no heart to love with. You are to rebuke philanthropy 
as fanaticism, and piety you are to overcome, and call su- 
perstition. Good taste is to be your accomplishment ; 
dress and dinner are to be your sacrament and commu- 
nion in both kinds. No angel of religion shall ever illu- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 133 

mine your heart ; you shall have ice for your comforter; 
and in that cold wintry sorrow to which we must all 
come, your diamond jewels will be great comfort in that 
hour ! 

Our devil meets the politician, and takes him with his 
cold, clammy hand, and says, " There is no higher law. 
Never try to cure an evil so long as you can make it 
serve you and your party." He meets the minister, and 
here his influence is worse than anywhere else. He tells 
him, " Public opinion is better than the eternal law of 
the Father ; the approbation of your parish (hunkers and 
Pharisees though they be) is above the approbation of 
God. Salary, — it is certain good ; salvation, — it is a 
whim. Never be righteous overmuch. Use men to 
serve you, and not yourself to serve them ; the less you 
serve men, the more they will obey you ; a crown is bet- 
ter than a cross. Dear Mister Minister, you need not 
rebuke any popular sin ; the sinners are always the best 
judges of what is sin ; so leave it to them." The poor 
man after that stands in his pulpit, with no conscience 
and heart and soul in him, and profanes the Bible by 
reading it, and mumbles over his prayers, which are 
almost ghostly, and had better be turned by a wind- 
mill than uttered by his poor voice. 

The devil meets all men with this counsel, — " Prefer 
your pleasure to the comfort of your brother men ; prefer 
your comfort to their imperious necessity. Conscience 
is a whim of your fancy ; religion is church ceremony ; 
piety, sitting at prayers ; charity, public almsgiving ; 
heaven and immortality, a silly trick, but useful for the 
million men; disturb them not, but enter not into the 
delusion." 

This is the devil of New England to-day ; not one that 
slinks round by moonlight, but that seeks the day, the 



134 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

broad street. He is not an open mocker, but a sly and 
cunning Pharisee. Be warned of him, young man ; 
young maiden ! He will meet you at school and college, 
in the parlor, the shop, the counting-house, the court- 
house, the office, and the church, and will sift you as 
wheat, and you shall be blown off as chaff if you do not 
heed, for he is seeking for your soul. In the period of 
passion he will seek to put a worm into your virtue, and 
cut off its fragrance ; look for no roses where he has 
been. In the period of ambition, he will tell you all is 
fair in trade, and in politics all is well that ends well. 
Ay, where is the end ? The end of self-abasement, what 
is that ? 

This is the devilishest of devils, — earthly, sensual, 
devilish. 



COURAGE. 

A man must needs have a courage which comes of his 
faith in God. There are various things which pass by 
that name. There is the courage of the murderer, who 
at noonday or at midnight strikes down his victim. 
There is the courage of the law-maker, who in the face 
of the nation, consciously, wilfully tramples under foot 
the sacred safe-guards of human right, and treads down 
what is holy, to make mischief by statute, and bring 
human law into contempt. There is the courage of a 
Judge Jeffreys, who sets the law of man at defiance, 
and scorns and spits upon the law of God, to serve the 
rage of a brutal king. All these forms have their admi- 
rers, and the last two are sure to be applauded in church 
and state in the nineteenth century, as they were in the 
seventeenth and eighteenth. There is a courage which 
comes of firm muscles, of nerves not over-delicate, which 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 135 

has its value ; and I would not underrate that sort, purely 
physical though it be. But the cool, calm courage which 
comes of self-respect, of earnestness of purpose through 
faith in God, is quite a different thing. That is a courage 
which can labor only by just and right means. That is 
a courage also that can wait. That is a courage that 
can suffer, with a u Father, not my will, but thine be 
done." There is a courage that is noisy, that is superfi- 
cial, that stirs men, and makes them shout, flushes the 
cheek, and fires the eye. But the courage that comes 
of earnestness of purpose and self-respect walks still in 
the street, and remembers there is an Eye that is on the 
man, and that is a courage that will not shrink. 



MORAL COURAGE. 



We hate to be in a minority. But the brave man, in 
his own soul, intimate with God, will always try himself 
by the pure eyes and perfect witness of the all-judging 
God. He will ask, not, What will men admire? but, 
What will God approve ? There have always been times 
which tried men's souls, and never more than now. You 
and I may be called on any day to forsake father and 
mother, and stand in a minority of one, with nobody to 
approve us but God. Such social trials are far harder 
to bear than to stand in a battle-field ; but with the wit- 
ness of your own heart, and God's approbation, you are 
blessed indeed, and may still possess your portion in con- 
tent, having more than twelve legions of angels about 
you, even the Father with you. Seek then, man, the 
praise of God, as all the heroes of mankind have done, 
as the prophets and apostles and martyrs, and as Christ 
himself has done. ' Never defer your sense of right to 



136 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

any love of praise. If you get approbation, take it as 
an accident of your excellence, and not as a sign. Count 
the praise you are clothed with as a sackcloth garment 
of penance which you must wear for not being above 
and before men ; and if you miss their approbation, be 
not sore, but the more loving. The integrity of your 
own soul is better than the best name which the age, 
present or to come, can ever give you. If you love 
God, that love will cast out all fear of human infamy, 
transcend all human praise, and fill you with saintly her- 
oism. The fame of the Christian is not fame with men, 
it is good report with God ; and that 

" Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, 
Nor in the glistering foil 
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies ; 
But lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes 
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove. 
As He pronounces lastly on each deed, 
Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed." 



DEFERENCE TO PUBLIC OPINION. 

It is not by self-respect and self-reliance that men get 
the reputation of being wise and prudent, but by sub- 
ordination, by a cringing deference to public opinion ; 
not by giving weight to superior personal qualities of 
other men, but to superior wealth, station, or great re- 
nown. When some years ago a young minister said 
some words that rung in the churches, the criticism 
made on him was, that he was not thirty years old. It 
is common for young men to postpone becoming true to 
their convictions until rich and well known. That is to 
put it off forever. Suppose Paul had waited until he 
was rich, or until he was a great and famous Rabbi, be- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 137 

fore he told men that Christianity alone was the law of 
the spirit of life, — how long had he waited, and what 
had he done ? Suppose Jesus, when about thirty, had 
said, " It will never do for a young man like me to re- 
spect my soul now ; I must wait till I am old. Did not 
Moses wait till he was fourscore before he said a word 
to his countrymen about leaving Egypt? " — what would 
have become of him? Why, the Spirit of God that 
irradiated his vast soul would have gone off and perched 
itself on the mouth of some babe or suckling, who would 
have welcomed the great revelation, and spread it abroad 
like the genial sun. Do you think that Simon Peter and 
John and James and Joseph would have been more likely 
to accept Christianity, if they had been rich and famous 
and old men ? As well might the young camel have 
waited till he was old and fat and stiff, in hopes to go 
the easier through the needle's eye. 



PERSONAL INTEGRITY. 

At first sight, the most attractive and popular quality 
in woman is always beauty, the completeness of the whole 
frame, and the perfection of its several parts, — for it is 
this which like morning light earliest strikes the eye, the 
most salient sense, which travels quickest and farthest 
too. At a distance the eye comprehends and appre- 
ciates this genius of the flesh, — the most spiritual organ 
of the body doing homage to the least material part of 
matter. But by and by, some faculty nobler than sight 
looks for what corresponds to itself, and finding it not, 
turns off sadly from the pretty face and dainty shape ; 
or discerning therein lofty powers of mind and conscience 
and heart and soul, things too fair for the corporeal eye to 



138 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

touch, is rejoiced thereat, and then values physical hand- 
someness as the alabaster-box which holds the precious 
spikenard and frankincense, with whose odor the whole 
house is filled. 

So the most popular and attractive quality in the pub- 
lic man, — lecturer, politician, lawyer, reformer, minister, 
— at first is doubtless eloquence, the power of handsome 
speech, for that is to larger and nobler qualities what 
physical beauty is to loveliness of the whole spirit. It 
is quickly discerned, felt as we feel lightning, it flashes 
in the hand, runs through our bones, and along the 
nerves, this music of argument. But the flash, the daz- 
zle, the electric thrill, pass by, we recover ourselves, and 
look for something more than words fitly spoken. So in 
the long-run, the quality men value most in all public 
persons is integrity. Webster, Everett, and Choate, we 
value for their eloquence, their masterly power of speech ; 
but the three Adamses, Washington, and Franklin, the 
nation values for their integrity. This is to eloquence 
what a wise, good, religious mother is to the painted girl 
at the opera, decked out, poor thing, to please the audi- 
ence for a single hour, and win their cheap applause. 
Integrity is a marble statue which survives the sacking 
of cities and the downfall of an empire, and comes to us 
from the age of Augustus or the time of Pericles, all the 
more beautiful for its travel through space and time ; 
while eloquence is like forms of chalk painted on a rich 
man's floor for one feast-night, the next morning to be 
scrubbed off and cast into the street. 

Integrity is to a man what impenetrability is to matter. 
It is the cohesive force which binds the personal parti- 
cles of my nature into a person. It is that quality of 
stableness which enables me to occupy my place, which 
makes me my own master, and keeps me from getting 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 139 

lost in the person of other men, or in the tumultuous 
crowd of my own passional or calculating desires. It 
is the centripetal force which holds me together, and 
keeps me from flattening out and thinning off until I am 
all gone into something else. It is domination over my- 
self, not servility to another. It is self-rule by my own 
highest qualities. By the primal instinct of the body 
we fend off every thing that would destroy the individu- 
ality of our corporeal frame, and thereby keep our flesh 
safe, whole, and sound. Everybody repels another who 
would wrench from him a farthing. By a similar instinct 
of spirit we keep off all that would impair the inner 
man and disturb its wholeness, and put another man's 
mind and conscience and heart and soul in place of our 
own, or which would make any evil passion to rule in 
place of what is highest and dearest in us. Thereby 
we keep our spirit safe and whole and sound. Integrity 
is made up of these two forces : it is justice and firmness. 
It is the mingling of moral emotions and ideas with a 
strong will, which controls and commands them. 

Now the first duty which God demands of men is that 
they be faithful, each man to his own nature, and each 
woman to hers, to respect it, to discipline it to its proper 
manner, and to use it in well-proportioned life. If I fail 
in that, I fail of every thing besides ; I lose my indi- 
vidual self-hood. Gain what else I may, the gain is of 
small consequence ; I have lost my own soul, and to get 
any thing without this and hope to keep it, is like keep- 
ing money in a purse which has no bottom. Personal 
fidelity is the first of all duties. I am responsible for 
what gifts God has given me, not at all for your gifts. 
You may be great, and I very little ; still I must use my 
little faithfully, nor ever let it be swallowed up in the 
stream of a great powerful man, nor in the grand ocean 



140 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

of mankind. Though I may be the feeblest and smallest 
of mortal men, my individuality is just as precious to me 
as nationality is to the largest nation, or humanity to 
mankind. This impenetrability and toughness of char- 
acter is indispensable to all nobleness, to all sturdy man- 
hood. It is the most masculine of virtues, the most fem- 
inine at the same time. It is fortitude of the flesh, 
chastity of the soul. But while I keep the mastery 
of myself in my own hands, I must use the help of 
the great men and the little men by my side, and of 
humanity. I must touch everybody, not mingle and 
lose myself in any one. I must be helped and helpful, 
and not mastered and overcome. So I can be taught by 
all teachers, advised by all history, past and present, and 
yet keep my flag on its own staff, and never strike my 
colors to any man, however venerable, or any multitude, 
however great. Self-reliant independence, discreet faith- 
fulness to the gifts God has given me, is the primal 
duty, is the Adam and Eve in the Paradise of duties ; 
and if this fails, others are not at all. 

Now there are two forces which disturb and often 
prevent this absolute personal integrity. The first is 
subjective, from within; the other is objective, from 
without. First, the instinctive passions, by their rapid, 
spontaneous, and energetic activity, and the ambitious 
desires, love of money, respect, and official power, get 
easily the mastery over a man, and his noble faculties 
are nipped in the bud. He has no blossom of manhood, 
and of course bears no manly fruit. The higher facul- 
ties of his intellect are stifled, the conscience dries up in 
the man, the affections fade out and perish, and in place 
of that womanly religion which his soul longed for as its 
fitting mate, a foreign superstition, a horrible darkness, 
sits in his gate, making night hideous. In this case, the 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 141 

man fails of his personal integrity by allowing his 
meaner appetites to rule him. I am a free, self-mastered 
man only when all my faculties have each their proper 
place ; I am a slave if any one of them domineers, and 
treads me down. I may be the slave of passion or of 
calculation, and in either case my personal integrity is 
gone more completely than if a master from without had 
welded his collar about my neck and his chain on my 
feet. I am more disgracefully conquered, for a man may 
be overcome from without by superior force, and while 
he suffers loss incurs no reproach, and his dignity is not 
harmed. But if I am overmastered by my own flesh, 
how base is my defeat ! 

The other disturbing force is objective, from without. 
Here other men fool me away from myself, and divulse 
me from my soul. Public opinion takes my free mind 
out of me, and I dare not think and speak till some one 
has told me what to say. Sometimes public law runs off 
with all individual morality. The man never asks what 
is right and manly, and squares with his conscience, but, 
"How far can I go and not be caught up by the 
sheriff?" How mean it is to silence the voice of God 
within you, and instead thereof have only the harsh for- 
mula of the crier of the court. Sometimes the popular 
theology turns off the man's soul from him. and sits 
there mumbling over those words which once flamed out 
of the religious consciousness of saints and martyrs, 
prophets and apostles ; but to him they are nothing but 
cold, hard cinders from another's hearth, once warm to 
some one, now good for nothing. How contemptible 
seems the man who commits high treason against him- 
self, levies war on his own noblest faculties, and betrays 
himself, and goes over to his own enemies. Of what 
avail then is money got by indirect means? Justice 



142 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OP 

makes us pay for it all ; it takes it out of our hide, if 
not out of our purse. How base is a man's respecta- 
bility, the praise of men which falls on him, when he has 
lost that foundation which alone can hold up any praise, 
his own self-respect, and faithfulness to himself ! How 
ridiculous is official power when the personal power of 
self-trust has gone ! How mean looks that man who has 
turned his soul out of doors to bring in the whole world ! 
I see him in his wine-cups, the victim of appetites and 
passions that war against the soul. I see him amid his 
riches, the slave of covetousness. I look at him when 
the applause of a convention of similar men repays his 
falseness to himself, the mere tool of the hand that feeds 
him. Is it worth while to take the opinion of the pave- 
ment instead of your own opinion, your own manly or 
womanly sense ? Shame on us that we are such cowards 
and betray ourselves ! 

But how grand, and not less than magnificent, appears 

" The man who still suspects and still reveres 
Himself, in nobleness and lowliness 
Of soul, whom no temptations from within 
Force to deformity of life ; whom no 
Seductions from without corrupt and turn 
Astray." 

Look at such a man in his pleasures, — temperate, full 
of open, daily blessedness, with no silent meanness of 
concealed joy! See him in his business, — erect as a 
palm-tree, no lies on his tongue, no fraud of tricky mind, 
no bad money running into his purse, but the New Tes- 
tament's Golden Eule lying on his counter, his desk, his 
bench, as a meet one by which to buy and sell ! See 
him in the public meeting, — faithful to himself, though 
he stands all alone ; public opinion, public law, public 
theology, may be against him, but a man on the side of 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 143 

his own soul has the Infinite God for his ally. Think 
not of his ever lacking friends. This is the foundation 
of all the rest. It is the first quality you ask of every 
man and of every woman. This you can build into any 
thing else that you will; but as the granite must be 
solid in the block before it is solid in the building, so 
you must have this integral personal impenetrability in 
the individual man or woman, before they are worth 
much in any relation of life where they are placed. 

Alas ! There is not much pains taken just now to pro- 
mote this personal integrity. How men laugh at it con- 
tinually and hiss it down. The husband asks this young 
woman, whom he weds, to surrender her personal integ- 
rity, and she ceases to be an individual woman, and be- 
comes only his wife. The magistrate asks the people to 
give up their personal integrity ; they have only to do 
just as they are bid and it will all come out right, he 
tells them, whether their souls be trod under the gov- 
ernment hoofs or not ; and so the man who accepts that 
doctrine turns into a fraction of the state, and is not a 
person of the state. The little silken virtues, perfumed 
with rosemary, current in what is called the world of 
fashion, fit its inhabitants to be beaux and belles, not 
men and women, with great manly and womanly charac- 
ter, thoughts, feelings, prayers, aspirations, life. .Some 
one said to me the other day, To be respectable in Bos- 
ton and welcomed into the best society, a man must sac- 
rifice his soul; individuality must go down before so- 
ciality. Jesus of Nazareth had a personal integrity as 
hard as the British cannon-balls which beat down Sebas- 
topol ; but nine ministers in every ten, in his name, tell 
men they must cast away all integral consciousness, 
and be only a branch of Christ. Not so ! I also am a 
tree, not a branch of any man. My individuality, though 



144 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

it is but the smallest shrub of humanity, roots into that 
great field of the world where Jesus and Moses and Plato 
and Aristotle and Leibnitz and Newton also stood and 
rooted and grew. God loves me as well as he loved those 
great and gorgeous souls, and if he gave them ten tal- 
ents, and me only two mites, which joined together make 
but the fourth part of a penny, he demands the same 
faithful use of me as of him who has the ten talents. 
This personal integrity is the oldest of virtues. To the 
spirit it is what bravery is to the body. It is the father 
of all the rest. 

What honors do we pay to saints and martyrs who 
kept their spirit clean amid the fire, and laid down their 
body's life rather than stain the integrity of their spirit ! 
At the head of American statesmen stand Washington 
and Franklin. Neither of them had a brilliant quality. 
but each had such faithfulness to his idea of official duty 
that their influence is ploughed into the consciousness 
of the land they lived in. 

Integrity is a virtue which costs much. In the period 
of passion, it takes self-denial to keep down the appetites 
of the flesh ; in the time of ambition, with us far more 
dangerous, it requires very much earnestness of charac- 
ter to keep covetousness within its proper bounds, not to 
be swerved by love of the praise of men, or official 
power over them. But what a magnificent recompense 
does it bring to any and every man ! Any pleasure 
which costs conscience a single pang is really a pain, and 
not a pleasure. All gain which robs you of your integ- 
rity is a gain which profits not ; it is a loss. Honor is 
infamy if won by the sale of your own soul. But what 
womanly and manly delights does this costly virtue 
bring into our consciousness, here and hereafter ! 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 145 

PERSONAL IDEALIZATION. 

I never trust any man's statement against his enemy. 
The idealization of hate destroys the personal likeness. 
So it is with the benevolent emotions ; they idealize and 
beautify. " There never was such a baby as our baby," 
says Edward to Susan, and Susan to Edward. How do 
Romeo and Juliet mutually purr over each other ! If a 
man has done us any considerable service, how do we 
idealize him ! The good old doctor, — how he is ideal- 
ized by his patients, or the noble-hearted minister by his 
hearers I " Good men are scarce," say they ; " there 
will never be such another." So with men who serve 
nations, especially if they fill a great office. The Amer- 
icans idealize Washington ; even painters and sculptors 
must transcend the fact. If some artist should paint 
Washington as he was at the age of sixty, and exhibit 
the picture, I suppose the Honorable Members of Con- 
gress would stone it with stones. A few years ago a 
minister, in a sermon on Washington, ascribed to him 
many moral excellences, and integrity greatest of all, in 
the heroic degree ; and wishing to paint the man just as 
he understood him, he mentioned the fact that he once 
told a great lie, and gained the battle of Yorktown; 
that he sometimes swore the most terrible oaths, and 
got into great wrath ; that he did not believe the popu- 
lar theology of his time, but probably thought as Frank- 
lin and Jefferson did. How angry were editors and 
ministers. None disputed the fact, but they were wrath- 
ful because the truth was told. The Athenians con- 
demned Anaxagoras to death, because he taught that 
the sun was fire. Accordingly, we do not trust the 
Buddhist's account of Buddha. Who ever believes the 

eulogies delivered in Congress or in Faneuil Hall, or in 
10 



146 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

meeting-houses? Funeral sermons are often as false as 
dicers' oaths. 

But this idealization passes away. By and by the 
mother who has borne ten babies has seen a thousand 
as good as her own, and knows her children just as they 
are. Romeo finds gray hairs in Juliet's pretty curls. 
The patient finds other doctors of skill, and that his is 
sometimes mistaken. The parish learns that the minis- 
ter has neither all the human virtues nor all the great 
talent ; that some little man of a despised sect has some 
wild-flower of humanity which their favorite has not got. 
The nation finds out that its great benefactors had both 
good and ill, and did not exhaust the possibility of man- 
kind. Other Athenians built a sacred monument to him 
whom their fathers condemned for telling the truth about 
the sun. How mankind loves the actual fact, truth as it 
is, in nature or man ! 

I have at home three great books, full of panegyrics 
which some rhetoricians wrote about the Roman Emper- 
ors. I would give them all for one moral daguerrotype 
of Julius Caesar or Alexander Severus. No wise man 
objects to idealization, but he does not like to have it in 
the same platter with the historic fact. I think the time 
has come when a small part of Christendom would like 
to look at a daguerrotype of Jesus, and be content with 
the historical person, just as he was, and give up that 
long series of fancy sketches which make up the eccle- 
siastical Christ ; for to my thinking, that noble-browed 
carpenter, with his great trust, and pious feeling, and 
grand life, is worth more than all the ecclesiastical 
dreams about him down to this day. 



Agreeable persons you always love best when pres- 
ent. Disagreeable persons whom you love, you always 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 147 

love best .in absence ; because imagination, stimulated 
by affection, supplies virtues whose ugly omission is 
pressed upon you when such persons are by. 



THE HAPPY MAN. 



The happiest man I have ever known is one far 
enough from being rich in money, and who will never 
be much nearer to it. His calling fits him, and he likes 
it, rejoices in its process as much as in its result. He 
has an active mind, well filled. He reads and he thinks. 
He tends his garden before sunrise every morning, then 
rides sundry miles by the rail, does his ten hours work 
in the town, w T hence he returns happy and cheerful. 
With his own smile he catches the earliest smile of the 
morning, plucks the first rose of his garden, and goes to 
his work with the little flower in his hand, and a great 
one blossoming out of his heart. He runs over with 
charity, as a cloud with rain ; and it is with him as with 
the cloud, — what coming from the cloud is rain to the 
meadows, is a rainbow of glories to the cloud that pours 
it out. The happiness of the affections fills up the good 
man, and he runs over with friendship and love, — con- 
nubial, parental, filial, friendly too, and philanthropic 
besides. His life is a perpetual " trap to catch a sun- 
beam," and it always springs and takes it in. I know 
no man who gets more out of life, and the secret of it is 
that he does his duty to himself, to his brother, and to 
his God. I know rich men, and learned men, men of 
great social position ; and if there is genius in America, 
I know that, — but a happier man I have never known. 



148 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

The worst idol that a man ever bows down to is a 
dead saint ; not a live sinner ; for the live sinner shows 
us his sin ; but we put a glory about the dead saint, and 
cease to see his follies, and become enslaved thereto. 



MODESTY A CHARACTERISTIC OF THE GREATEST MEN. 

Almost every great man has been modest ; certainly 
all that were great in the noblest forms of human excel- 
lence. The great philosophers like Newton and Kant 
have been more modest than the sophomores of a col- 
lege. The Shakespeares, Miltons, and Burnses, I doubt 
not, were not half so well satisfied with their work as 
is the penny-a-liner of the daily press with his, or the 
poet who opens a city lyceum, who mistakes the mo- 
mentary applause of young men for lasting fame. Chev- 
alier Ba} 7 ard probably never boasted so much of his 
exploits as some arrant coward who hacked his sword 
behind a hedge, that he might exhibit it to the admiration 
of men in bar-rooms. Saint Paul reckons himself as the 
least of the apostles, though his works have left a monu- 
ment in Ephesus, and Corinth, and Rome, and many 
other great cities, and your and my piety is warmed at 
this day by the words uttered from his great burning 
soul. Did not Christ refuse to be called good even? 
This modesty is one of the significant and descriptive 
marks of men of worth. It is of their genus and species 
both. Not the thanksgiving, " Father, I thank thee that 
I am not as other men are !" but the penitent cry, " God 
be merciful to me a sinner ! " were the justifying words 
which sent the publican to his home a wiser and a better 
and a more accepted man. 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 149 

Not they who court the public applause get their 
names joined in stable wedlock with fame ; but they who 
scorn that applause, and ask only for their own soul's 
approbation, and the praise of God. Their names it is 
that live forever. 



POWER OF FEELING ESSENTIAL TO GREATNESS OF CHAR- 
ACTER. 

For a complete and noble character you want a great 
power of feeling, and especially do you want it for all 
the high forms thereof. You do not need much for 
man in his merely mechanical and artificial function, to 
make a mere soldier, a mere naturalist, tailor, priest, 
jobber, for these names designate only special callings 
of men, wherein feeling is not much needed. Despotic 
judges never want any feeling in the jurors. The tyrant, 
whether a democrat or an aristocrat, never wants feeling 
in his magistrates ; they are to execute the law ; the 
worse it is, the more they are to execute it ; for a 
righteous law does itself, but a wicked law needs a great 
deal of executing. There will be feeling in such per- 
sons, as there are fringed gentians beside the mill-pond, 
which have nothing to do with the business of the mill. 

A man without large power of feeling is not good for 
much as a man. He maybe a good mathematician, a very 
respectable lawyer, or doctor of divinity, but he is not 
capable of the high and beautiful and holy things of man- 
hood. He cannot even comprehend them ; how much 
less do and become. It is power of feeling, as well as 
thought, which furnishes the substance wherewith the 
orator delights and controls and elevates the mass of men. 
Thought alone is never eloquent ; it is not enough, even 
for the orator's purpose ; he must stand on the primeval 



150 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

rock of human consciousness, must know by experience 
the profoundest feelings of men, their love, their hate, 
their anger, their hope, their fear, and, above all things, 
their love of God, and unspeakable trust therein. Feel- 
ing, he must make others feel. Mere thought convinces ; 
feeling always persuades. If imagination furnish the 
poet with wings, feeling is the great, stout muscle which 
plies them, and lifts him from the ground. Thought sees 
beauty, emotion feels it. Every great poet has been 
distinguished as much for power of emotion as power 
of thought. Pope had more wisdom than Burns, Pollok 
as much as Wordsworth ; but which are the poets for the 
man's heart and his pillow? In great poets like Homer, 
Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, — noblest of them all, — 
there is a great masterly power of feeling joined to a 
great masterly power to think. They see and feel too, 
and have the faculty divine of telling what they feel. 
Poetry and Eloquence are twin sisters ; Feeling is their 
mother, Thought is the father. One is directed more to 
beauty ; sits still in the house, her garlands and singing 
robes about her all the day. The other is devoted more 
to use, cumbered with much serving, wears a workday 
suit. But they have the same eye, the same face, the 
same family likeness. Every great artist, painter or 
sculptor, must likewise have great power to feel. Half 
the odds between Raphael and a Chinese painter is in the 
power of feeling. But few men are poets, orators, sculp- 
tors, or painters. I only mention these to show how for 
the high modes of intellectual activity feeling is neces- 
sary. 

It is equally necessary for the common life of men. 
Thought and feeling both must go to housekeeping, or it 
is a sad family. The spiritual part of human beauty, 
man's or woman's, is one-fifth an expression of thought, 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 151 

four-fifths of feeling. The philosopher's face is not hand- 
some. Socrates, John Locke, John Calvin, and Eman- 
uel Kant, are good enough types of mere thought, hard 
thought, without emotion. It is the power of feeling 
which makes the wise father attractive, the strong-minded 
mother dear. This joins relatives nearer than kindred 
blood ; it makes friendship actual ; it is the great ele- 
ment in philanthropy ; it is the fountain whence flows 
forth all that which we call piety. Philanthropy is feel- 
ing for men, friendship is feeling with men, and piety is 
feeling with God. All great religious leaders have been 
men of great power of emotion, — Mahomet, Luther, 
Loyola, Wesley, Whitefield ; and what we admire most 
in Jesus is not his masterly power of thought, but his 
genius for love, power of feeling in its highest modes. 
His intellectual character is certainly of great weight, 
his foot-prints are very deep ; but most men do not 
think of Jesus as a great-minded, a great-thoughted man. 
" Neither do I condemn thee ; go, and sin no more ; " 
" Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do ; " 
— thought alone had not reached up so high as that in 
that age and in this young man, but a great mountain of 
spontaneous human feeling pressed on him, and drove 
that fount up to such heights of sparkling piety. 

But all men of great feeling are also capable of great 
wrath. Where the sun is hottest, there the lightning is 
reddest, and the loudest thunder speaks. There was 
never such blessing as Jesus pours out in the beati- 
tudes. Was there ever such cursing likewise -as that, — 
" Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites ! " ? I 
know very well how men love to picture Jesus of Naza- 
reth, men who never had a great mighty feeling, who 
never felt a mighty love, who were never swayed by a 
mighty wrath. They say he was the lion of the tribe of 



152 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

Judah ; but they think he was a lion with no teeth nor 
claws, who could only roar like some mouse in the wall. 
It is not so. They understand not his depth, nor even 
their own. It was not after that sort that the writers of 
the first three Gospels described him. They represent 
him not only as shedding his sunlight, but as thundering 
and lightning also. Do not tell me that those fiery words 
were spoken with cold lips ! Depend upon it, his eye 
looked round and flamed like fire in the New-Hampshire 
woods, and men turned off from that countenance. In 
due time no doubt all became calm again. I think the 
power of wrath was lodged in him only as in every civil- 
ized military country there are kept great breaching 
cannon ; they are not brought out on holidays, the boys 
have never seen them, and the old men hardly remem- 
ber them ; but once in a while in the nation's life these 
great cannon are brought out, and speak with fearful 
roar. God has lodged the faculty of wrath in man, not 
to be our master, but to be our servant. You see it thus 
in Jesus. 

I do not think that we take pains enough with the 
culture of this emotive part of our nature, especially 
with the higher feelings, — love in either of its forms, 
directed in friendship or philanthropy towards men, or 
in pure piety towards God. Here are two reasons for 
this neglect of our emotional culture. One is the mer- 
cantile character of the people, where we calculate 
every thing, and somewhat overrate the understanding 
in comparison with the other powers ; for our arithmetic 
is not yet quite capable of calculating the exact value of 
philanthropy, of friendship, and of piety, and after all our 
ciphering we have not got a calculus to appreciate these 
nice and powerful emotions. The other reason is that 
we have false notions about religion, for the form of re- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 153 

ligion which prevails most in North America is Calvin- 
ism, and that is the cold, hard, dry religion of a man with 
vast intellect and great will, but very little power of 
emotion, and of the higher feelings of love to man and 
love to God, scarce any that I could discover with any 
solar microscope which I have brought to bear upon his 
character or writings. In consequence of this, which 
has vitiated our religious culture in the very fountain of 
it, men think that feeling is a little unmanly, and when a 
young man or an old man makes his ideal of what he 
ought to be, he does not put in much emotion, but great 
wit and great understanding. Half the women in New 
England think it is wicked to let their affections take 
hold of friend, relative, husband, or child, with such a 
strong grasp as the feelings would naturally lay there ; 
they think it is so much love taken from God, — as if 
natural love for God's creatures was not also natural love 
for God ; as if this was not the ladder whereby we climb 
up to love infinite and absolute. Besides, the picture 
that has been presented of God himself, is not such that 
anybody could love it much. We fear God very much, 
but love him very little. I mean it is the nature of Cal- 
vinism to produce that effect. 

To be complete men we want much more power of 
emotion, much more love, human and divine, than is al- 
lowed in our schemes of education. But we want it not 
as our master, only our helper. Reflective man must be 
the lord of the instinctive emotions. Feeling masters 
the savage child ; but the well-grown man is self-mas- 
tered, and rules his feelings, not they him. The feel- 
ings may be made the end of the man's spiritual experi- 
ence ; he may stop with emotion and go no farther. 
Such men remain children, and become no more. If a 
man cultivates his affectional feelings, but does not put 



154 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OP 

them to their natural work, then the feelings become 
sickly and morbid, and dwindle into mere sentimentalism. 
The sentimentalist is one of the unfortunate productions 
of society, a victim of circumstances, like the drunkard 
and the thief. He nurses his feelings, perhaps, on nov- 
els, full of overwrought descriptions, high-flown expres- 
sions, ghastly sorrows, and impossible delights, and weeps 
at the ideal woes which are pictured there ; or if of 
graver turn, indulges in martyrologies, tales of dreadful 
wrongs which man heaps on man. These furnish excite- 
ment to his feelings, the man dwells in dreams of inces- 
sant emotion ; but you may ask of him any noble deed 
of self-denial, any sacrifice for humanity, to give up a 
single pleasure for an actual suffering man, — and you 
may as well look for violets in a Siberian winter. I know 
such men, and still more such women, from whom I 
should never look for any thing in the shape of works. 
With them sympathy is a delight, and the greater the 
suffering which calls it out, the greater the delight ; com- 
passion is a luxury. Some of these pass for philanthro- 
pists. They are only moonlight philanthropists. They 
would like to go down on their knees to serve some fabu- 
lous queen who had been carried off in an encounter, on 
the back of a green dragon, and they dream of doing 
some such deed as that ; but they could not teach the 
cook who lives in their own house her letters, nor watch 
with a sick friend all night, nor go without their dinner 
to save a common life of such persons as they meet in 
the streets every day. A sentimental philanthropy is 
worth just as much as a chain-cable made of glass. 

Here is another form of the abortive development 
of feeling. The religious feelings may suffer a similar 
estoppel, and dwindle into mysticism and mere quietism. 
Men, oftener women, may have great warmth of feeling, 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 155 

— love of God, trust in God, reverence for God, delight 
in God, prayer to God, thought of God, — which yet 
has no influence on the life. It bends the knees, keeps 
Sunday idle, crowds the meeting-house, makes a market- 
place for religious books at home, to mingle with other 
finery, where on the same table you shall see " puffs, 
powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux.' 7 It never opens 
the purse towards the poor, nor turns the capitalist's 
money to building reasonable tenements for them. 
When men seek religion as a means of pleasure, to 
cultivate emotions of trust and love of God for their 
own selfish delight, it becomes as fatal to them as the 
gaming-house, the drinking-shop, or the brothel. There 
is a literature which feeds this mode of action. There 
are other libraries besides that of Don Quixote which 
ought to go the same way as his went. The very In- 
quisition itself was built up and is sustained by men 
who riot in mere voluptuousness of religious emotion 
and stop there. These are the dangers of a wrong 
cultivation of the feelings. 



MEANNESS AND GENEROSITY. 



Generosity and meanness are to each other as heaven 
and hell, the two extremes of disposition and conduct 
in our mode of dealing with other men. Generosity is 
a certain manly and womanly virtue, raised to a high 
power ; meanness is an unmanly and unwomanly vice, 
carried down to the last degree. One is benevolence, 
felt with joy and achieved with alacrity ; the other is 
selfishness, cherished in the heart, rolled as a sweet 
morsel under the tongne, and applied in life to the 
fullest extent. Each may be regarded as an internal 



156 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

disposition, — that is, a mode of feeling, a form of char- 
acter ; and also as an outward manifestation, — a mode 
of action, a form of conduct. As an inward disposition, 
meanness is that kind of selfishness which would harm 
another whom it has at a disadvantage ; it is injustice 
mixed with cowardice, and put into a form not only 
wicked, but hateful to our sense of right. It is a most 
unhandsome emotion. On the other hand, generosity, 
as an inward disposition, is that kind of benevolence 
which wishes well to such as it has at disadvantage, 
and changes a power to hurt and harm into a power to 
help ; it is justice mixed with courageous love, directed 
towards men whom it might secretly injure and harm 
for its advantage, but whom it chooses to help and bless 
for their own profit. 

Now let us look at meanness in its outward mani- 
festation ; first as showing itself in things which are 
measurable by money, which is pecuniary meanness, 
and next in respect to things not thus measurable, 
which is meanness of behavior. First, of pecuniary 
meanness. Thrift is ability to master the material world, 
securing power thereover, use and beauty therefrom, 
comfort and elegance therein. Man is by his instinctive 
nature a hoarding animal ; by his intellectual conscious- 
ness he is also progressively thrifty. Our civilization 
is the child of time and of thrift. No nation, no man, 
no woman, was ever too thrifty, more than too strong, 
too healthy, too handsome, or too wise. Thrift is a point 
which is common, on the one hand, to generosity, on the 
other, to meanness. It is their point of starting ; and 
starting thence, Amos slopes up to generosity, a con- 
tinual ascent, while Francis pitches down to meanness, 
a perpetual stumble, an everlasting descent, getting 
steeper and steeper as he goes down, for the farther he 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 157 

goes in his meanness the faster he becomes mean. Now 
in his pecuniary dealings with men, man mixes his thrift 
with selfishness, leavening that bread into ugly, mis- 
shapen, and nauseous lumps, which he thereby imbitters 
and also poisons. So his thrifty desire becomes covet- 
ousness, an ungodly longing for something which is not 
his, and his thrifty conduct becomes avarice, miserliness ; 
that is, getting what he wants without paying the natu- 
ral price therefor, or the getting of his own on terms 
which are unjust, unmanly, wicked, and so manifoldly 
contemptible. An ingenious man thus distinguishes 
rheumatism and gout: Put your hand in an iron vice, 
and let some one screw it up as tight as you can bear, 
and that is rheumatism; then give the screw another 
turn, and that is gout. Now what rheumatism is to 
gout, avarice is to meanness ; give the covetous screw 
another turn, and that is pecuniary meanness. The 
mean man is not courageous enough to turn the screw 
openly by daylight ; he does it by stealth, and in dark- 
ness, — for meanness is not only injustice, but it is a 
cowardly and sneaking vice in the form of its injustice. 

To make the matter more clear, let me give some 
examples of meanness which have come before me in 
my early or my later life, taken chiefly from a distance, 
and from persons I think unknown to you ; for it is not 
any specific individual that I wish to hit, but the vice 
itself. 

One cold winter day, in my boyhood, a wealthy farmer 
in my native town put on his sled a cord and a half of 
green poplar wood, which looks very much like the best 
of hickory, but is good for nothing ; — it will not burn 
in the present state of the arts and sciences. With his 
oxen he drove his team to Boston, reaching the town 
a little before dark, at an hour uncommon for teams of 



158 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

wood to enter the city. He stopped in Cambridge 
Street, pnlled out a stake from his sled, and dropped 
down a portion of his load into the street, pretending he 
had met with an accident, and was unable to proceed 
any farther. " Why did you come so late ? " said the 
neighbors. " Oh," said he, " I had promised the load 
to a certain man. It is the best kind of wood, and is 
going to pay me a reasonable price. I could easily 
unload it and get home before night. But I met with 
this accident." A black man offered to buy the wood, 
and the farmer offered it at what he called a lower price, 
at a dollar and a quarter a foot. The black man took 
it, helped the farmer to unload, paid him his money, and 
asked him to stay to supper, which the farmer declined, 
because the purchaser was a black man, and passed over 
the bridge homewards, leaving the wood, which to the 
man who bought it was worth no more for fuel than so 
much ice ; and when he got home he told the story. It 
was one of the earliest examples of meanness that came 
to my boyish consciousness. I have met with many of 
the same sort since, seldom quite so bad in form, but 
sometimes even worse. 

Here is another. A poor man was a rum-seller in a 
little country town in Middlesex County, and another 
yet poorer man, who loved his neighbor's tap better 
than his own house or his family, had incurred a debt 
at the dealer's shop to the amount of ten or twelve dol- 
lars, but he had no means to pay. " I'll put you in jail," 
said the creditor. It was years ago when the Statute 
Book of Massachusetts was deformed by that wicked 
law of imprisonment for debt. The man answered, 
" You had better not ; you will have to pay my board 
all winter ; it is now November ; I have little to do this 
season, and I shall live better at your cost in jail than 



HUMAN CHARACTER ASD CONDUCT. 159 

by my own little earnings at home, and when the March 
Court comes in, I shall swear out, and you will have 
nothing for your debt, and will have incurred great 
expense to support me." " Then I will attach your 
property," said the creditor. " I have not any thing 
except my furniture and a pig, and the law allows me 
that. Wait till spring, when my work begins again, and 
I will pay you." The creditor thought of it. The poor 
man had a pig, which was exempt from attachment, a 
thrifty animal which had been fattened for the winter, 
and was worth twenty or twenty-five dollars. It was 
the food of the family, granaried up in a pen. A few 
days after, the rum-seller met his debtor, and pretended 
some compassion on him, and gave him a little runty 
pig, not worth two dollars. " Take this," said he, " carry 
him home ; it won't cost you much to keep him through 
the winter, after you have killed your great one, and 
next year he will become a large animal." The poor 
man gratefully took it home. Then he had two swine, 
one more than the law exempted from attachment. And 
the next day, at the creditor's command, the sheriff 
attached the fat swine, and the poor man was left to 
look to the winter and the rum-seller's conscience for 
his children's bread. 

Many years ago, in a large town of America, there 
lived a wealthy man, owning a million of money and 
more, got by meanness and excessive thrift. One Sun- 
day evening, accompanied by his daughter, he visited 
his son in another part of the city, and remained some 
hours. The merchant was old, the night stormy, the 
streets full of ice. The daughter could not walk home. 
A coach came for her, the father put her in, and to save 
his twenty-five cents refused to ride ; and when the 
driver said, " Why, really, sir, I think you had better; it 



160 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

is very slippery, and you are likely to fall on the ice and 
be hurt, so old a man as you are, begging your pardon ! " 
" Oh, no," said the millionnaire, " I will run across and 
get home before you do. I shall not fall; I am not 
afraid." The carriage started, and the millionnaire 
stealthily jumped on behind and rode home. When near- 
ly at his own door he leaped down and ran forward, 
hypocritically puffing and blowing, as if he had walked 
briskly through the snow. He was too cowardly to steal 
the twenty-five cents from the coachman's pocket, and 
he more sneakingly stole it out from the hind end of his 
coach. 

But the forms of this pecuniary meanness could not be 
counted in one hour, nor in many, for their name is 
legion ; but they are always the same devil. One other 
example, however, which I knew in a distant town, is 
too striking to be passed by, and too often repeated not 
to need condemnation. A poor young man, fighting for 
his education, working whilst he studied, and teaching 
while he essayed to learn, once opened a school, where 
he taught all manner of English branches for four dollars 
a quarter, and other higher discipline and various for- 
eign and dead languages for five dollars a quarter ; and 
the quarter was twelve whole weeks. One of the 
wealthiest men in the town, who had a bright boy whom 
he wished fitted for college, urged our poor schoolmaster 
to take his son and teach him Latin and mathematics for 
the smaller price, and thus robbed him of four dollars a 
year, which was nothing to the father, but to the school- 
master was what the one ewe lamb was to the poor man 
in the Old-Testament story of Nathan and King David. 

Sometimes a man sneaks away from the assessors, and 
hides his property from taxation, leaving the uncon- 
cealed property of honest men to bear the public bur- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 161 

den. It is a thing not at all uncommon for a man with 
great property to move out of Boston at the end of 
April in order to escape the assessor of taxes on the first 
of May, and thus leave the burden to be borne by 
widows and orphans, mechanics and small traders, who 
either could not, or else would not, escape the duty 
which is common to all. Then, how many examples do 
we all know of men who will not pay their honest debts, 
and yet are wealthy and have the means of doing it. 
Safe from the law, they recognize no higher law above 
the statute which gives them exemption to enjoy the 
money which they have legally filched from honest 
hands. In little towns of New England, lectures are 
sometimes given to the public without any charge to the 
specific individuals who attend them; so that no man 
through lack of money may be debarred of the pleasure 
or instruction derived from listening to the words of 
some man of genius, talent, or learning. The expenses 
are paid by a general subscription, where each gives 
what he will, and in such cases it sometimes happens 
that a man with property enough refuses to pay any 
thing, but yet crowds in with his family, and takes ad- 
vantage of what his neighbors paid for. Nay, in all 
churches where the cost is defrayed by the voluntary 
gift of such as will, who contribute each according to his 
several ability or inclination, there are always men who 
partake of the advantage, but decline their part of the 
payment, and thus, as the Methodists say, they steal 
their preaching. The law punishes getting goods on 
false pretences, but leaves untouched that other kind of 
swindling, getting religion on false pretences. 

No man can judge of what is meanness in another ; 
you and I can judge of the appearance. There is One 

who looketh into the heart, and doubtless there are those 
11 



162 TEAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

who to the eyes of men seem mean, and certainly draw 
upon themselves the reproach of their brothers, whose 
hearts are yet open and generous ; and when the dear 
God looks in he says, " Well done, good and faithful ser- 
vants ! " Towards those persons I would bow in rever- 
ential admiration, giving them my poor applause and 
support, standing between them and the harshness of 
the world, which sees not with the divine eyes. 

I have heard of mean parishes, who received the 
labors of some faithful and unworldly minister all the 
sound years of his life, and in his old age put a new man 
into his pulpit, which was right, but left the old man's 
hairs, which age had whitened, to be scattered by pov- 
erty, and brought down to the grave with sorrow and 
shame at the ingratitude which he was too generous to 
call even by its name. But, to the honor of Puritan 
New England, let me add that such cases are exceedingly 
rare. Now and then I have seen a mean minister who 
filched money from his congregation on all occasions, 
and stealthily got what he never paid for nor gave to the 
poor, but eat his morsel by himself, the fatherless not 
eating it with him, nor the poor getting warmed by the 
fleece of his sheep. For such a minister I hope I might 
be forgiven if I should feel something which came near 
to contempt. But I rejoice to think that that vice is 
very uncommon ; for of all the educated men of New 
England, I think that no class is so generous with money 
as the ministers, who contribute their little means with 
rare freedom from stint. And this is the distinguishing 
peculiarity of no sect, but common to all of them, from 
the Episcopalian to the Universalist ; and it is no won- 
der, for how could this difficult virtue fail to be kept by 
men who read the New Testament in public, Sunday out 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 163 

and Sunday in, and in private fold it to their bosoms, 
counting it as the Word of God ? 

Now, let us consider meanness of behavior. An angry 
man strikes his foe with all his might ; a mean man 
strikes him after he has got him down. I shall never 
forget a mean boy I knew when at school. He loved 
fighting, and delighted to set other boys at blows, while 
himself looked on, and now and then he gave a kick, 
always to the vanquished party, and never to him except 
when he was on the ground. Sometimes he would beat 
a small boy, but never took one of his own size. He 
insulted girls, when bigger boys were not by to redress 
the insult with that summary justice which comes out of 
the fists of boys. He would whisper envious and re- 
vengeful thoughts into the unwilling ears of others. I 
learned a terrible lesson from him in my early life, and 
cannot think of the tyrant without shuddering that such 
a devil should have crossed my path in my childhood. 

Here is a mean man who abuses his employers' confi- 
dence, cheats them behind their backs, wastes their 
goods, consumes their time, leaves their work undone. 
So he gets his daily wages by daily swindling. I meet 
men of this kind, in their divers forms, throughout 
society. Here is one, a servant of a railroad, who squan- 
ders its stock. Here is another, a conductor, who 
charges men for riding, and puts the price into his own 
pocket. Here is another, ruler of a nation, using his 
great official power to plant slavery where slavery never 
was. 

Here is another mean man, who started from an 
humble position in society, and has risen therefrom, 
mounting on money; but now he is ashamed he was 
ever poor, ashamed of industry and economy which 
helped him up, and, still worse, ashamed of the poor rela- 



164 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

tions whom he left behind him in the narrow street or 
the little village where he was born ; nay, worse than 
that, he seeks to keep men poor, whom he uses as his 
instruments for accumulating his own estate. His money 
gives him increase of power to help mankind ; he uses it 
to hinder mankind. When he was an obscure and poor 
young man he went to meeting in some little Methodist, 
Baptist, or other unfashionable church, and the minister 
and deacon and standing committee welcomed him, say- 
ing, u Come in ! We read St. James. There is no dif- 
ference between the rich man with his costly garments 
and the poor man in his humble attire. The rich and 
the poor meet together, and one God is the maker of 
them all. Come in, and perhaps you also will see God, 
who speaks to our hearts in our humbleness." Now that 
he has got rich and famous, he takes his money to some 
fashionable church, not going there to see God, but in 
order that men may see Mm. 

Here is a mean editor, who flatters the popular vices, 
which he yet despises. He praises all the popular great 
men, though he has contempt for them in his heart, and 
is sure to attack ever} 7 - one who seeks to remove a pop- 
ular vice ; no term of reproach is too severe or too scur- 
rilous for him to hurl at the head of such as advocate 
any unpopular reform. How he jeers at every woman 
who pays her tax, and asks to have a voice in disposing 
of the money. Every eighth man in America is a slave, 
and if you say aught against bondage, Mr. Popular Bit- 
terquill shoots his venom at you the next day, and all 
his kith and kin, from Madawaska to Sacramento, repeat 
the virulence. He never tells you of American ships < 
detected in the slave-trade and captured, even by Bra- 
zilian cruisers ; but if an honest man has spoken against 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 165 

the wickedness of the Union, he is denounced at once as 
a traitor. 

Sometimes you see a minister mean in his behavior. 
Mr. Littlefaith was a man of large intellectual powers, of 
costly education, and commensurate learning ; he had 
got over that superstition which blocked the wheels of 
most of his parishioners. They gave him the bread he 
eat, put on him the garments he wore, built him the 
house he lived in, paid for his costly books in divers 
tongues ; and by their actions, when the parish came up 
before him, and in their prayerful-looking faces as they 
sat under his eye, they said, " Mr. Scholar, we cannot 
read your learned books ; we have not the time, nor the 
patience, nor the culture. Thrash out for us the kernel 
of that broad literary field, and then give us the pure 
precious grains of wheat, that we also may have the 
bread of life ; for why should we die, not only in tres- 
passes and sins, but in superstition, in fear and trem- 
bling? Point out the errors of our public creed, rebuke 
the sins of our private conduct." And the minister, 
communing with himself, said, " No, Mr. Christian Par- 
ish ! If I tell you the truth I have learned, and you 
have paid me for looking after, I shall get the hatred of 
such men as neither look after it, nor wish for it, nor see 
it. I think I shall tell you no such thing." By and by 
another minister, simpler hearted and younger, rises up. 
He sees the truth which the first minister saw, and with 
fear and trembling, with prayers and tears of agony and 
bloody sweat, he tells it to mankind with what mildness 
he may ; and the Philistines and Pharisees all cry out, 
" Away with such a fellow ! It is not meet that he 
should live. If we cannot give him damnation in the 
next life, we will roast him with our torments in this." 
Mr. Littlefaith comes forward and casts the heaviest stone, 



166 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

and persecutes the new minister with the intensest bit- 
terness and hate. Of all the meanness I have spoken of 
hitherto, this is the meanest. It is meanness in the 
place of piety, meanness in the name of God. 

I wonder that any man can be mean. I take it that no 
man, no woman, would prefer disease to health, ugliness 
to beauty, weakness before strength. What would you 
think of a man who had his choice of clean health, of 
active limbs and senses, which at five portals let in the 
handsome world of strength and beauty, and yet pre- 
ferred disease, and by his own choice became coated with 
a leprosy all over, and was ugly as the devil? Yet I 
would take disease, foulest leprosy, loss of limbs, these 
hands, these feet, the loss of every sense, these eyes, my 
ears that listen to man's voice or woman's speech of gold, 
rather than be barked about and dismembered by such 
meanness as I sometimes see. Look at that man ! He 
is mean in his pocket, mean in his opinions, mean in his 
behavior, mean in his shop, mean in the street, afraid of 
a charity, mean in his house, a mean husband and swin- 
dles his wife, a mean father and wrongs his children, 
mean everywhere. Pass him by ; he is too pitiful to- 
look upon ! Meanness has three degrees ; it is first 
earthly, it is sensual, and, finally, it is devilish. 

Let us turn now to the more pleasing contemplation 
of generosity. What a beautiful excellence it is ! 
Whether manifested in the pecuniary form of money, or 
of behavior, it is still the same thing, — justice mixed 
with love, leavened into beauty. It is both a manly and 
a womanly virtue, so fair and sweet that it is always 
alike pleasant and profitable to dwell thereon ; for, as in 
the thick of the crowd, and the dust or mud of the 
streets, of a cloudy and dark windy day, you sometimes 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 167 

meet face to face with some sweet countenance, so radi- 
ant with beauty that all the street seems luminous with 
light, filling your eye, and you pass on, a certain sense 
of a beatitude trickling down your consciousness all day 
long, to be remembered with thankfulness years after in 
your evening prayer, — so do I feel towards generosity; 
and as beauty is handsome in any robe, for nothing fits 
it ill, and all becomes what is itself so becoming to each, 
and so draws the eye in all stations where this sunbeam 
may chance to light, so is generosity attractive and en- 
nobling to look upon in any of its forms, pecuniary, cor- 
poreal, or of the spirit. 

Generosity implies self-denial of low appetites, so that 
you prefer another, and postpone yourself, setting his 
comfort above your luxury, his indispensable necessity 
before your comfort, and putting also your soul with its 
higher aspirations before your body with its grosser 
needs. And yet the generous man does not count it 
self-denial ; no, rather is it manifold letting loose and 
indulgence of his nobler elements ; for as the water runs 
down and the fire flames up, so the generous man does 
of his proper motion ascend, — to him a descent, the 
fall of meanness, being as adverse as for the flame to run 
down or the water' up. I wonder if my experience has 
been peculiar to me, or is there really so much gener- 
osity in the world as there seems to me, and do others 
likewise so abundantly meet therewith? for though I 
have found rough places in the earth, and trod them 
barefoot besides, and cloudy nights above, yet have I 
also met with such as made the rough places smooth, 
and continually in space do the clouds turn out their 
silver lining on the night, or a white star trembling 
through looks so generous that all the sky below seems 
fair, as it reveals the handsomeness of that sweet heaven 



168 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

above, beyond all reach of actual storm. Everywhere 
do I find less meanness and more generosity. 

A ticket-seller at a railroad counter the other day told 
me of a mean man, who inherited a large estate, he being 
the only child. He had a pew in the Orthodox Meeting- 
house, whereof he was church member, and he let a seat 
to a poor woman for three dollars a year. She lived 
miles away, and could not always come through the 
snow and rain. When twelve months were gone by, 
she told him she should not want his seat again, and 
offered him his money. He counted up the Sundays 
since first she came to his seat, and found that she had 
kept it one more than there were Sundays in his Chris- 
tian year, and so he demanded six and a quarter cents 
besides. But that was a solitary example ; the whole 
church -could not furnish another ; nay, the village, in its 
two hundred years of municipal life, could not tell such 
another story ; and every finger in the town pointed at 
the man till the grave closed over him, and it points to 
his gravestone to this day. The fact that this was an 
exception shows the generosity of the little town. 

On nights of journeying, and at other times of sleep- 
lessness, I sometimes think over the generous men and 
women I have known, recounting their liberal deeds, 
which spread out before me like a wide meadow in June, 
beautiful with buttercups, and fragrant with clover and 
strawberries newly ripe, deeds which their actors have 
long since forgot, and which I, of all living men, am now 
perhaps the only one who can remember and recount. 
As these come up before me, at this transient resurrec- 
tion of the just and generous, my eyes brim and run 
over with thanks to the dear God who gives such gifts 
unto men, and created us with a nature that bears this 
harvest of nobility, as New-England soil grows oaks and 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 169 

pines, the natural herbage of that generous ground. I 
am not insensible to that cloudy meanness which some- 
times shuts down and gathers in about us, but some 
generous star always relieves the gloom, and shines a 
good deed in what were else a naughty world, and tells 
of that whole heaven of generosity into whose calm 
depths meanness can never come. For each example of 
meanness, I have a whole encyclopedia of generosity, a 
vast literature of generous men, and still more of gener- 
ous women, — for this sweet violet of the heavenly 
spring, prophetic of a magnificent summer, like other 
tender and delicate virtues, thrives best in that fair 
warm soil on the feminine side of the human hill. In 
all fishing after intellectual prizes, it is the masculine 
Peters who first draw the net on the right side of the 
ship, and take miraculous draughts therefrom, and the 
net yet not broken. But in the chase after that higher 
and well-favored excellence of conscience, heart, and 
soul, it is that other and feminine disciple who outruns 
the bearded and broad-shouldered Peter, and first sees 
the angels of humanity, finds the ascending nobleness, 
and tells the men slow of heart in believing, that she has 
seen the Lord. 

Look now at generosity in its pecuniary form. How 
much generosity of money is this town daily witness to, 
with all its small and great vices, its snobbish vulgarity, 
and the mean insolence of upstarts who ride on money. 
Spite of all that, I think Boston is the noblest city in 
the world, surely the most generous with its money. 
Nowhere on earth is a miser less esteemed, nowhere so 
much despised. By his money he gets pecuniary power 
in the street, has stocks for sale, dollars to let, houses 
and shops to lease, and so of course he has commercial 
power; but through his miserly money he acquires no 



170 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OP 

political honor, not the least. He cannot buy an office 
of the United-States Government, he can never get any 
thing at first-hand from the American people. He gets 
no social honor. True, he has matrimonial and ecclesi- 
astical power, for a city is like the " great and wide sea, 
wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small 
and great beasts. 7 ' Some marketable woman will sell 
her body to his arms ; some hireling minister will he fee 
to praise him while above ground, and to deck him with 
fancied virtues when below the soil ; some commercial 
editor, as marketable as any thing in his price-current, 
will hold him up as a pattern for imitation ; the Mercan- 
tile Library Association, despising the miser, on its pub- 
lic days will give him a seat on its platform among 
honorable merchants ; nay, when the Cradle of Liberty 
spills out the child of humanity, and men-stealers crowd 
thitherward, an ungodly pack, our mean rich man has 
his place on the kidnappers' platform. That is all the 
honor the miser can get in Boston, to the credit of the 
dear old Puritan town, the mother of so many virtues. 
There his money breaks down. He gets no honors of 
the people at first-hand, only old damaged honors of the 
retailers and hucksters of such things ; and least of all 
can his money bring him the homage of the heart which 
we honestly pay to nobleness in rich or poor. Dead 
examples and living still reveal this remarkable fact, — 
the names of mean rich men of the last generation 
publicly rot in their merited infamy, and the names of 
others for the next fifty years will make some future 
gibbet creak with their undying shame. 

Boston, all New England, is rich in monuments of pe- 
cuniary generosity. Look at some which chronicle its 
most conspicuous acts. There is Harvard College, with 
its schools of theology, law, medicine, science, its pro- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 171 

fessorships, its libraries, — the New-England scholar's 
joy and honorable pride ; with its charitable endow- 
ments, which like an arm from the clouds hold out a 
lamp to many a bright boy, or come like the prophet's 
bird, bringing bread and flesh in its beak j with its ob- 
servatory, holding the telescope where the eye of culti- 
vated genius looks through the glass of commercial gen- 
erosity, and beholding worlds unseen to the naked eye 
of sense, declares its revelation to all mankind. These 
are monuments of New-England riches, trophies of gen- 
erous men, who provided for literature and art and 
science which they could not understand, but that their 
sons and the sons of the people should be made glad 
thereby ; nay, such as left no son nor daughter have 
thus made a long arm to reach to countless generations 
and do them good. Here too is the Boston City Li- 
brary and the Athenaeum, likewise fountains of sweet 
waters in what were else a literary wilderness. Here 
too are the Lowell Lectures, where one man's money 
turns into wisdom, science, and philosophy for the peo- 
ple. Then behold the hospitals and asylums all about 
the town, built by private generosity, asylums for the 
needy and the sick, where the rich man's money is trans- 
figured into the scientific mind, the skilful hand, and the 
affectionate watchfulness which soothes the sick head 
and cheers the fainting heart. Here, too, are asylums 
for the deaf, the dumb, the crazy, and the fool, and mani- 
fold other charities to help the widow and the fatherless, 
and those friendless girls whom the public leaves to die 
with earthly damnation, whereof some young man, living 
in his body, officiates as devil, or serves as imp. 

Above all cities, Boston has an honorable fame for 
the large bounty of her wealthy men. I need not here 
recall the names of those newly immortal, who entail 



172 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OP 

riches on the public, the dead hand of their ever-living 
charity still scattering the wealth its gatherers, heavenly 
Christians now, loved to transmute to human excellence. 
But for each one such, there are hundreds of men not 
largely rich, but not less generous, whose generosity is 
not seen. We mark the lightning, we hear the thunder, 
but there is a noiseless passage of electricity from the 
earth to the sky, which every day is a million times 
stronger than the thunder and lightning in the heeded 
storm. Where there is one rich man who sweeps up 
the crumbs that fall from his table, and nobly makes 
thereof a public gift, there are a thousand men who 
cut a morsel from their needy loaf, and stint their hum- 
ble meal ; but it is not told of, though it feeds the poor 
man's babies, or helps the scholar on his upward way. 
Let us honor the generosity of the millionnaire, but not 
forget the generosity of the hand-cartman or the hod- 
carrier, who spares sixpence from his daily drink or 
tobacco, or goes supperless to bed, to help the widow 
or the baby of another man who drew a handcart. 
These things you and I do not see ; there is One who 
beholds them, and gives the reward. No Pharisee saw 
the Avidow's two mites ; some vulgar rich man probably 
turned off with scorn ; but Jesus said she had given 
more than they all, and now they are a gospel all round 
the world. They are a Bible Society of themselves. 
The great funds of the Bible Society, the vast expendi- 
tures of the Society for Foreign Missions, the money 
which builds all the meeting-houses of New England, 
Catholic and Protestant, are accumulated mostly by 
small driblets from the people, a shilling here, a dollar 
there. Nay, the proud library of Harvard College was 
founded by a few ministers, giving or lending such books 
as they could spare. Massachusetts once taxed herself, 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 173 

making every householder pay one shilling, or a peck of 
corn, to Harvard College. It is a magnificent monument 
to the generosity of the old Puritanic State, and she did 
this also when her settlements only reached from Wey- 
mouth to Ipswich, and did not extend twenty miles 
inward, and besides she was fighting a war with the 
Indians. 

Here is a man, surely not rich, who helps to build 
chapels for the poor, houses also of most Christian archi- 
tecture for men of small means, and with others' eyes 
he watches for poor boys and girls in the crowded ways 
of Boston, and puts a piece of coin between the child of 
humanity and the child of sin, and saves many a son and 
daughter from perdition. That countenance, not more 
beautiful with its natural comeliness than when it is 
transfigured with generosity, I love to look upon, when 
I meet him in all manner of philanthropies, at the War- 
ren-street Chapel, which is almost his child, in his houses 
of comfort and of cheapness for the poor, or on the Com- 
mittee of Vigilance, which in the hour of Boston's mad- 
ness helped to watch in keeping her children from the 
stealer's hand. When public generosity halts, it is such 
men who hold up the weak hands, strengthen the feeble 
knees, and confirm the trembling heart. 

How many young men and women do I know whose 
generosity is a little excessive, and my older and gray 
prudence must moderate their youthful experience, and 
give back half their benefaction, lest the young man's 
tap be too much for his barrel. If a bright boy at col- 
lege needs a little assistance, there is always some man 
or woman who reaches out a golden hand and helps him 
on. Nay, in more than one instance have I known the 
dead hand of an old miser reach out of the ground, by 
entailment still clutching his money, and wishing to 



174 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

spend it meanly, but some dear daughter held that hand 
in her bosom, and the leprous hand, turned clean and 
white once more, scatters broad the charities that heal 
and soothe and bless. 

If a man have a generous disposition, it will appear 
not only in the giving, but in the mode of getting ; for 
it is narrow generosity which looks only to the spending, 
not also to the acquisition. So let me tell a generous 
tale of a merchant. He was a jobber in dry goods. One 
day a country customer came into his store, and handed 
him a memorandum, a large one, of articles he wished 
to purchase. The generous man looked it over, fixed 
the price to each article, and then said, " The steamer 
came in last night ; I have not got my letters yet ; there 
may have been a fall in goods, and perhaps you had bet- 
ter wait a couple of hours, and go out and inquire, and 
then come back." He went out, found the goods had 
fallen in price, and came back and reported it, saying he 
could get them cheaper elsewhere. " Very well, that is 
all right," was the reply of the merchant. There was 
generosity at the till. Generosity which puts its hand 
in and gives out is common enough, but generosity at 
the other extreme is rarer ; but is it not the golden rule, 
which has two ends, giving and getting ? 

See another form of generosity in the manly use of 
the body. Every war brings to light examples of amaz- 
ing physical generosity, which yet surprise nobody be- 
cause they are so common. In the Crimean war there 
were only two things which to my eye were admirable ; 
one was that heroic bravery of the manly flesh, the other 
the more heroic bravery of a woman's heart, to which I 
need only refer. I have small respect for fighting, not 
the greatest esteem for animal courage, in which a bull- 
dog, I suppose, would be superior to a Franklin or a 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 175 

Channing, perhaps to a Paul ; but I have devout rever- 
ence for a man whose conscience is in it ; who lays his 
life down in a battle sooner than relinquish a duty ; great 
reverence for the men who have gone to Kansas to plant 
the tree of freedom over the heart of the continent, 
though they are sure to water it with their blood, which 
the national administration meanly thirsts to drink. This 
generosity commanding the heroic flesh is common 
amongst men, not rare amongst women. It appears ev- 
erywhere in war, and it appears elsewhere when there is 
no battle of that kind to be fought. In railroad disasters, 
so common in America, how seldom do you hear of any 
cowardice amongst the men. With what manly disdain 
of death do the engineers, stokers, and brakemen perform 
their duty, even laying down their lives to save the lives 
of those put under their hands. Here is an example of 
generosity which looks in the same direction. A rail- 
road train not long since was detained in a snow-bank, 
and the passengers had no food for thirty hours ; and 
when bread came, not a man would bless his mouth with 
a morsel till every woman had been abundantly supplied. 
It did not get into the newspapers ; the thing is so com- 
mon, we expect it always. In troubles at sea, how rare 
it is that you hear of any lack of heroism. I remember 
but one example in my time : When the Arctic, ill-built, 
ill-managed, ill-manned, became a ruin, there was such 
unmanly cowardice as I think the ocean has very sel- 
dom seen, or buried in his broad and venerable breast. 
But with what indignity was it treated in all corners of 
the land ; every sailor, from the forecastle to the quarter- 
deck, looked upon it as a slight put upon his own pro- 
fession, and we shall not hear of such another act of 
cowardice till we are old men. When a fire breaks out 
in any city, how noble men plunge into the flames, amid 



176 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

beams which blaze under tliem ; and rafters which fall 
burning from the roof, and where red-hot walls bow and 
tremble. What heroism and generosity is there in all 
that ! Last autumn, when the yellow fever came to Nor- 
folk, how did the despised American slave come out and 
share the loathsomeness of his master's disease, or that 
of his mistress, waiting perhaps on some woman who 
had robbed the stalwart man of his manhood and made 
him a beast of burden. 

"Forgot were hatred, wrongs, and fears ; 
The plaintive voice alone he hears, 
Sees but the dying man." 

One such who might have escaped from the city, when 
the pestilence had dismantled the guard, and repealed 
every fugitive-slave law, when solicited to leave, refused 
to abandon his master in his distress. He waited till he 
had become healed of his sickness, and then fled off, 
and when questioned, told me the tale. In one of the 
large towns of the North there is a youngish man who is 
a mariner. I should not dare to tell his name or that of 
his vessel, lest I should betray his neck to the Southern 
gallows. Across the gulf of African bondage this man 
in his ark of deliverance has brought more than a hun- 
dred fugitive slaves, and set their feet safely down on 
free soil. I have seen some of his passengers, newly 
landed, and the gratitude which they expressed for him 
was such as you might expect from a soul that had stood 
on the edge of the imaginary Calvinistic pit, and had 
thence been snatched away, and carried to a place in the 
kingdom of heaven. It is not so hard a thing to front a 
cannon in battle as to go into the Southern States, month 
after month, and year after year, and take men out from 
the fetters of bondage, and set them down in a large, 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 177 

free place, fronting the ghastly gallows of the South, its 
prison, and its certainty of injustice and wrong. 

You see a memorial of this kind of generosity in yon- 
der tall finger of stone on Bunker Hill, which points up 
to God's higher law, in deference to which the men whom 
the monument commemorates laid down their lives on 
that venerable spot. Perhaps you have more reverence 
for fighting than I, perhaps less ; at any rate we can 
honor what lay at the bottom of the fighting and is ready 
for other generous and heroic action, — the stern con- 
sciousness of duty, and willingness to postpone self that 
right may go forward and humanity triumph. 

Look now at generosity of a nobler kind, at generosity 
of character. In its highest and most difficult forms of 
manifestation, it devotes its mind and conscience and 
heart and soul to noble works. There are men who have 
no money to offer, more than Simon Peter had of silver 
and gold, who are never called on to face peril, nor have 
the power to make the lame man walk and praise God ; 
who yet have other things to endure which make the 
soldier's heroism seem poor and cheap. How many ex- 
amples do we see of this generosity, which is not con- 
densed into a few acts, a water-spout of benevolence, 
but diffused over a man's life, an evening dew, gener- 
ously coming down in meadows newly mown, with noise- 
less foot, cheering the weary and heated plants, bowed 
together, and in no wise able to lift themselves up ! 

Some years ago I knew an old man in Boston, not 

rich in monev, but whose life ran over with continual 

good deeds. He begged other men's bread for the 

needy, this great mediator between dollars on the one 

side and want on the other, and gave it to the poor, 

with the benediction which made it sweeter than storied 

manna to the Hebrews, faint and ready to perish. His 
12 



178 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

presence with the afflicted was a sovereign balm that 
soothed the smart of agony, and made glad the faint 
heart. His arms were folded round many an orphan. 

" Beside the bed where parting life was laid, 
And sorrow, guilt, and pain, by turns dismayed, 
The generous champion stood : at his control 
Despair and anguish fled the struggling soul ; 
Comfort came down the trembling wretch to raise, 
And his last faltering accents whispered praise." 

Like the providence of God, he mixed beauty with be- 
nevolence, and, begging from rich men's gardens, carried 
flowers to many a sick girl or failing woman, that the 
eyes soon to be shut on earth might at their close look 
on some beautiful blossom, which like that other star of 
Bethlehem should go before her, and at length stand 
still before the spot where angels were gathered to re- 
ceive her spirit newly-born. 

Here is a woman whose generosity is public, which 
looks into the jails of America, and teases half the legis- 
latures to give the lunatic a home. Nor do I honor less 
another, whose generosity of soul runs over continually 
with rarest Christian beauty, and gilds the outside of 
the cup, which to hundreds of orphan babies is their 
cup of life, and also of blessedness ; nor less two women 
more, whose ever-living humanity seems almost as gener- 
ous as their God's, with uncompromising self-denial de- 
voted to those deeds which themselves requite, and 
while they are a blessing to whoso takes, are also a be- 
atitude of immortal life to such as do. But of these and 
other such let me speak softly, for their right hand 
would tremble if the left hand overheard it at its work. 
Time would fail me should I presume to tell of a tithe of 
the examples of this kind of generosity which every 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 179 

year, every month, makes known to me. I cannot count 
the apple-blossoms for the coming month ; .so in silence 
let their beauty exhale to heaven, while the sweetness 
half turns and transfigures itself to fruit for times to 
come. 

Here is a man in a sister city, of fine powers and 
scholarly attainments, a most intense love of literature 
as art and profession, who devotes his toilsome days to 
the friendless children of the streets ; and the powers 
which he might convert to fame and riches for himself, 
he turns into humanity, and therewith transfigures to 
virtuous men and women the sons and daughters of the 
vulgar streets of New York, who would else choke the 
jails, and perish by the vengeance of the public law. 
How much higher generosity is this than the mere giv- 
ing of alms ! Why, it is the pelican feeding not her own 
young, but another's young from her own bosom. 

Not many years ago the schools of Massachusetts-were 
quite incompetent to their great work of the public edu- 
cation of the people, and one of Massachusetts' noblest 
and ablest sons, on the high road to honor and to wealth, 
a politician and a lawyer, President of the Massachusetts 
Senate, gave up his chance of riches, renounced the road 
to public fame, and became schoolmaster-general to all 
the children of the State. His labor was double his for- 
mer work, his pay not half his customary fee, and of 
honor he had none at all ; but mean ministers, mean 
schoolmasters, mean editors, made mouths at the first 
Superintendent of our Common Schools, and that was 
his immediate reward ; nay, when he modestly asked of 
the Legislature a little room in the State House, with 
proud disdain the democrats turned their backs on him, 
and said he should not have it; nay, when the politi- 
cians of the State grew stingy, and doled out not quite 



180 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

enough to build a Normal schoolhouse, and not another 
cent could be pinched from them, our poor, generous 
lawyer sold his books to build the schoolhouse for the 
wealthy State, in that neglected cause spending and 
being spent, though at that time the more he loved Mas- 
sachusetts the less he was loved in return. Now in 
another State he toils for a college where he receives no 
pay, supporting his family by bread earned by toil else- 
where, lecturing over all the land in the winter, that the 
rest of the year he may teach the children of Ohio in a 
college which as yet can only afford to give him his 
house and firewood. In due time Massachusetts woke 
up from her sleep, when it was a little too late, and 
turned round and generously honored the generous 
man. 

Here is a man in a New-England town whose life for 
many a year has been one act of continual generosity. 
His purse has been only too open to every noble charity. 
He is one of the many benevolent men I know, whose 
benevolence I never ask for any one, because the hand 
is more ready to give than to take the new or get the 
old : but he is also one of the few to whom I say, " You 
give too much ! It is more than you owe in justice, 
or even in charity. Hold back a little, good sir, this 
time." The door of his hospitality seems never shut ; 
his elastic walls are an alms-basket to many an African 
for whom Boston men are hunting with the dog of the 
law. Therein the Ethiopian has changed his skin. 
Theological faith which can remove mountains, — what 
is it to these works, which can transfigure an African 
slave into a self-respectful man, and that with no miracle 
but charity? Poor forsaken men, hated and evil-en- 
treated of the world, find there a shelter, and the cause 
which he knew not he searched out. Others went 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 181 

amongst the sound, seeking their ease and comfort ; 
this good physician was found among the sick, the friend 
of publicans and sinners. Was the cause of humanity 
unpopular, because too high for popular comprehension? 
White men of superior education, and a social respecta- 
bility which might overawe the public into reverence 
for the rare virtue they had not grown up to, and could 
not therefore comprehend, shrunk off, and even threw 
stones at such Samaritans as lifted up men fallen among 
thieves ; — he went forward manfully, and with open 
face endured the public shame which waits on all who 
will be wise before their time, and go above it. With 
spiritual hospitality more generous than his material 
welcome, he looked for those ideas which are the fore- 
runners of a better time, and was not forgetful of such 
strangers, and so fed angels at his board, not always 
unawares. When all New England trembled before the 
Devil, he welcomed universal salvation. He only judged 
of God's mercy by his own. When woman was counted 
inferior, flattered by fops and evil-entreated by the law, 
he remembered his mother was as dear to him as his 
father, had equal rights with him, and he sought to 
secure equal rights for all womankind. When the advo- 
cates of a dark theology sought to block the wheels of 
progress in front, to silence the freedom of speech, and 
put the chains of ecclesiastical bondage all round New- 
England pulpits, and with a thread of Spanish iron to 
sew up the mouths of young Protestants in the nine- 
teenth century, he also resisted that wickedness, and 
took part for justice, truth, and mercy, the more openly 
and strongly because the world made righteousness a 
reproach, and blackened Christianity with the name of 
infidelity. There was generosity far superior to that 
which lays down its life on the battle-field. It is easy 



182 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

to be generous with money, so long as you only give the 
crumbs which fall from your table ; nay, it is not hard 
to bestow public alms or public charities with some 
little self-denial, when you thereby win the praise of 
the churches, which now pay honor to this form of 
charity, and never fail to do so, — God be thanked for 
that ! Nay, when want stares you in the face, it is not 
easy for one bred on the Bible to say to the poor man, 
" Depart, and be ye warmed and fed and clad ! " and 
never give any thing. There is none of us into whose 
consciousness St. James's Christian rebuke would not 
spring at once, when he needlessly turned thus off. But 
to practise self-denial of money, ease, honor, quiet, and 
do it continually, year out and year in, and never be 
weary, and to do this for a despised cause, to be despised 
on account of it, — why, such generosity as that is only 
to be expected from a man in his babyhood nobly born, 
and who has elevated his noble birth to lofty heights by 
a continual practice of religious self-denial and faith in 
the dear God. 

Here is a man in Boston, born to what most men 
covet most, namely, a competency of money and that 
social standing which comes of an estate some gener- 
ations old, well gifted with the power to know, and the 
wondrous power to tell, till others think they knew it 
all before, blessed with a culture to correspond, a man 
fitted to be an ornament to the society of this town, 
and to shine in the official honors of the State. At an 
early day this man espoused the cause of men despised 
of all mankind ; his purse was open to the slave and 
all that were oppressed, and his eloquent voice came 
pleading with America, u Why will you do such wicked- 
ness, — the meanest form of wrong ? " — " brother 
men ! " he cries, " your constitution is a covenant with 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 183 

death, an agreement with hell. It must not stand, it 
cannot stand, it shall not stand ! Away with it ! Learn 
to love mercy, and do justly, and walk humbly with 
your God." Did he not know that office, honor, social 
respect, would all flee from him, and he be counted as 
the offscouring of the world ? It was as plain to him 
twenty years ago as now. He made himself of no 
account that he might serve man, yes, God. Can you 
appreciate this generosity ? Then you are wiser than 
your town, more Christian than that church miscalled 
of Christ. 

I have sometimes complained of the superior education 
of America, that it is almost exclusively of the intellect, 
and not of the higher spiritual faculties. Surely our 
scholars have cut themselves off from the instinct of 
humanity. A thousand meo college-bred will have less 
justice, love, and piety than a thousand farmers from 
the fields, or mechanics from the shops. But among the 
scholarly men of the land, there is one above the rest, 
great in generosity as well as in exquisite genius, where- 
in he excels all the children America has borne in her 
bosom. In his place as minister, lecturer, writer, he 
never said a mean thing ; but as the apple or feather or 
falling meteor drops to the centre of the world, so by 
his own generous instinct, the greatness of his human- 
ity, does he gravitate towards the noblest and fairest 
things. Where justice is, where truth, love, religion 
are gathered together, there is he in their company, this 
highest, brightest, fairest star in all America's literary 
heaven. While other scholars pale away, this man, full 
of generosity, still keeps his eye undimmed, and his 
voice, like a trumpet, calls to the people, " Come up 
higher ! Come up higher ! " 

As I spoke of the mean minister, I must also say a 



184 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

word of a generous one. In another city there is a son 
of Boston, also of our venerable college not far off, who 
is a minister of righteousness ; not a worshipper of the 
fictitious Christ of the Church, but an admirer of the 
real Jesus, who brightened the world with his flowery 
presence. He is a friend of contemplative Marys, and 
of Marthas also, careful and troubled about much serv- 
ing. He is the friend of publicans and sinners, of 
Lazarus laid at the rich man's gate, and of Dives, at 
whose porch the unheeded beggar lay ; full of devout- 
ness, which is partly personal and partly inherited, but 
also the freest of men. Thoughtful for himself, he asks 
of others to think for themselves, notwithstanding he 
is a minister, and never ventures to put his mind in 
place of theirs, and usurp authority in the heart of those 
who listen to his words. All the humanities congregate 
in his house, and are there at home. He is the champion 
of temperance, peace, education, and is also the great ad- 
vocate, and one of the earliest, for the American woman 
and the African slave. He has so much nobleness that 
few of his ministerial brothers have humanity enough 
to understand him, and so they revile this man, and cast 
out his name as evil, and he bears it all with that same 
magnanimity of soul which the good mother shows to 
the wickedness of every little feeble-bodied baby when 
it is nervous and sick. Pious without bigotry or nar- 
rowness, moral without austerity, earnest always, but 
never harsh, strict to himself, indulgent to a friend, and 
lenient to a foe, — his face gleams, like that of Moses in 
the story, with the manly generosity of his heart, and 
it is a benediction in the church where he statedly 
preaches, and has been sometimes also a benediction to 
you, when with that evangelical sweetness he has stood 
before you, and preached peace and righteousness, and 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 185 

judgment to come. In the meeting-house he is beau- 
tiful, and in his home, with his wife and children, his 
presence is a beatitude done into flesh and blood. 
When I meet the good minister, I thank God, and take 
courage, and say, " Whatever Jesus would have thought 
of your opinions, I am sure he would have sat down by 
your side and put his arms around you, and said * My 
Brother ! ' " 

There is one form of spiritual generosity not common, 
and perhaps not commonly praised, and that is forgive- 
ness of injuries, to feel no enmity to your enemy, to bless 
them that curse you, to do good to such as hate you, 
and pray for them who despitefully use you and perse- 
cute you. That is the severest test of the highest gen- 
erosity, and of all the crosses Jesus called on his disci- 
ples to take, there was none so heavy to be borne as 
this. Who is there that is generous enough to be just 
to a foe ? How rarely do we find virtue in a man who 
opposes our sect, our party ; or if one crosses our pri- 
vate path even, how commonly do we pay him back with 
the meanest hatred and contempt. Now generosity does 
not require that we should think black white, nor vice 
virtue, nor that we should consider any of the present 
attempts against personal liberty any thing less than the 
open wickedness which they appear on their face ; but 
whatsoever judgment conscience requires against the 
wrong deed, it demands also love, a sense of kindliness 
to the most evil and most malignant doers of the wicked 
deed. I can find some examples of this highest gener- 
osity, now with men, oftener with women, perhaps ; and 
in comparison with this sweet virtue of forgiveness, how 
mean seems all the vengeance in the world 1 To be able 
to hold your hands, and look on the man who has wronged 
you bitterly, and say, " My brother, the deed was of the 



186 TRAJTS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

Devil, the doer I forgive/and here is my brotherly hand," 
— in comparison with that, envy, hate, revenge, triumph 
over a foe, seem like those little worms which crawl in 
the mire where an elephant walks over them, with his 
imperial and majestic tread. 

From antiquity there have come down to us the vener- 
able names of great men, heroes of the flesh, also of the 
thoughtful intellect. I bow before their lofty memories, 
and the reverence does me good. Men of generous 
blood and noble deeds were they. But amongst them, 
and yet something apart, as if of nicer and more femi- 
nine mind, there stands one whom God gifted with most 
wondrous genius for religion, and all the dear humanities. 
He dared to make a generous use of what the Father 
generously gave, and stepped in front of the world so far, 
that when the world could not comprehend him, nor even 
tolerate, but nailed him to the cross between two thieves, 
he bowed his head and said, " Father, forgive them, for 
they know not what they do." I honor the generosity 
of money, the generosity of the flesh ; but the highest 
generosity, generosity kept still in death, which breathes 
its life away in a beatitude for its murderers, — why, it 
transfigures humanity out from its lowly weeds, and dis- 
closes that nature a little lower than the angels, the very 
image and likeness of God. 

Do not suppose that a great, generous man will fare so 
well in the newspapers, in the streets, with the priests of 
commerce, as a mean man will. He will fare well in 
his own character, and have the sympathy of our Father 
and Mother in heaven, — recompense from God. A really 
generous man will have patience with mankind, will con- 
tinually see meanness preferred and generosity despised ; 
for his greatness of gift was not given him, nor his great- 
ness of achievement attained, for his own sake, but man- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 187 

kind's also. So he asks no pay for generosity, spending 
and spent for others, though the more he loves them the 
less he be loved of them. 

Men talk as if there were not much generosity in man- 
kind, and for proof they point to the fate of the highest 
greatness of virtue on earth, and to Humility, who walks 
barefoot, bearing another's burthens through the street, 
and is splashed by the mud in the garments and in the 
face, by the coach and six where Pride flaunts by, while 
the crowd hurrah for the coach and six and the gilded 
worm that sits therein. " Look," says the unbeliever in 
generosity, " at Moses fleeing from Egypt, at the treach- 
ery of his countrymen ; at the prophets slain and sawn 
asunder ; at John the Baptist, his head in a dish ; at 
Jesus crucified between two thieves ; at Mahomet forced 
by those whom he would uplift and bless to flee at night 
from Mecca on a yellow camel, snatching hastily a cruse 
of water and a bag of barley ; at Arnaldo da Brescia 
burned by the pope, and his ashes scattered in the Tiber ; 
at John Huss and Jerome, burned alive by the great men 
of their times ; at the reformers of our time. The state 
hates him who would mend the state ; whoso would bless 
the church with more piety, the church bans with its 
curse and remands to its hell. Look at Boston at this 
day, where it is thought respectable to tread personal 
liberty down underneath the hoof of the vulgarest of 
office-holders. Where then is the generosity amongst 
men ? It is only exceptional, here and there a little ! " 

I see how mean and selfish Napoleon the Great was. 
treated in his lifetime, and how in his noblest days gen- 
erous Washington was met, a price set on his head by 
his king, and every tory who hated personal liberty, 
from 1776 to 1787, threw stones at him. But this does 
not discourage me. I look at these examples, and in 



188 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OP 

their completed history do I see the generosity of man- 
kind. The cry of Israel reached the ears of Moses ; 
their treachery had exiled him ; he goes down to Egypt, 
and the Bed Sea opens before his banners, he finds bread 
in the desert, water in the rocks, and ere long is not only 
the nation's king and lawgiver, but the nation's god. 
The words of the prophets, too true in their time for the 
popular belief, have become the Holy Scripture of the 
Jew. John the Baptist lays his head under a dancing 
harlot's sword, but he bequeaths his memory, with sturdy 
faithfulness and love, to the keeping of mankind. The 
apostles of whom the world seemed not worthy, the 
world turns and worships. The name of Arnaldo da 
Brescia becomes a fire all over the Catholic country. 
John Huss and Bohemian Jerome are honored by the 
world, while it despises the pope who slew them. See 
what welcome America gives to her hero now ; even 
mean men, tories, make capital out of the nation's rever- 
ence for him. Listen to the world's judgment of Napo- 
leon the Great : — " Let him stand there, a colossus of 
bronze on his column in the Place Vendome, a thousand 
cannons high, starred all over with his victories, glitter- 
ing with the twofold light of military and political 
genius." That tall column, a thousand cannons high, is 
only the gallows on which he gibbets his mean selfish- 
ness to the lasting gaze and indignation of mankind. The 
Mahomet whom Mecca was not able to honor, is wor- 
shipped as the great legislator of millions of men. Jesus 
crucified between two thieves, — two hundred and sixtv 
millions bow their faces down before him, of whom those 
seemingly the least reverent call him the greatest and 
the noblest of men, in whom humanity rose highest. 

Everywhere you find more generosity than meanness. 
Open your eyes in any little town, and see how many 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 189 

generous men, and yet more generous women, there are. 
I know persons, young and old, who continually postpone 
their own delight for the sake of generous deeds ; their 
own vineyards they keep not, that others' they may tend. 
It is by such generous souls that the world moves on. 
Selfishness smokes his cigar, drinks his voluptuous wine, 
is clad in purple and fine linen, is welcome to many a 
gay saloon ; while Nobleness is austere to his body, and 
pinches and spares for lofty ends, and into his house 
come all the virtues, and blessings in their train. 

O young man ! young woman ! It may be you 
cannot practise the generosity of the dollar ; you may 
not have it, though most have this power to some extent. 
If you are rich, by all means lay largely out here, remem- 
bering that what is generously spent in this way for 
another, God pays back to you in good you never asked 
nor thought. God is your debtor. He is never bank- 
rupt ; he pays not merely cent for cent, but manifold. 
Practise, by all means, generosity of the body, which is 
in the power of all ; and likewise generosity of the soul, 
which is spread over the whole life ; in every depart- 
ment of human action there is daily opportunity for the 
exhibition of that. Let us abhor the vice of meanness ; 
let us practise generosity, not profligately, but in a manly 
and womanly fashion, at any rate with human nobleness. 
It is a religious duty; for God has been generous 
towards us, in the nature in which he has created us, in 
the world he has given us, in the flowers that adorn its 
ground, in the stars that spangle its sky. He has sent 
us that prince of generosity, the dear Jesus, who used 
his noble gifts never with meanness, always with gener- 
osity, setting us an example how we also ought to do. 



190 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

CHRISTIANITY AND CHRISTIAN FORMALITY. 

When you see old Mr. Goodness, an unpretending 
man, honest, industrious, open-hearted, pure in his life, 
full of justice and mercy and kind deeds, you say, " That 
man is a Christian, if anybody is." You do not ask 
what he thinks about Jonah and the whale, about the 
beast with seven heads and ten horns, the plagues of 
Egypt, the inspiration of the Bible, the nature of Christ, 
or the miraculous atonement. You see that man's reli- 
gion in the form of manly life ; you ask no further proof, 
and no other proof is possible. When you say you wish 
Christianity could get preached and practised all round 
the world, thereby you do not mean the Christianity of 
Dr. Beecher, of Dr. W T ayland, of Calvin or Luther ; you 
mean that religion which is natural to the heart of man, 
the ideal piety and morality which mankind aims at. 
But when the Rev. Dr. Banbaby speaks of Brother Ze- 
rubbabel Zealous as a great Christian, he means no such 
thing. He means that Zerubbabel has been baptized, — 
sprinkled or dipped, — that he believes in the Trinity, 
in the infallible inspiration of every word in the Bible, 
in the miracles, no matter how ridiculous or unattested ; 
that he believes in the total depravity of human nature, 
in the atonement, in the omnipresence of a personal devil, 
going about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may de- 
vour, and eternally champing in his insatiate maw nine 
hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand, while 
God, and Christ, and the Holy Ghost, can only succeed 
in saving one out of a thousand — perhaps one out of a 
million. Banbaby reckons him a Christian because he 
has been " born again," " put off the natural man," — 
that is, made away with his common sense and common 
humanity so far as to believe these absurd things, — 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 191 

draws down the corners of his mouth, attends theologi- 
cal meetings, makes long prayers in words, reads the 
books of his sect, gives money for ecclesiastical objects, 
and pays attention to ecclesiastical forms. He does not 
think old Mr. Goodnesses long life of industry, tempe- 
rance, charity, patriotism, justice, brotherly love, profits 
him at all. He is only an unregenerate, impenitent man, 
who trusts in his own righteousness, leans on an arm of 
flesh, has been born but once, and will certainly perish 
everlastingly. It is of no sort of consequence that Ze- 
rubbabel is a sharper, has ships in the cooly-trade, and 
is building swift clippers down in Maine to engage in 
the African slave-trade, as soon as the American Govern- 
ment closes that little corner of its left eye which it still 
keeps open to look after that. Old Mr. Goodness's 
" righteousness " is regarded " as filthy rags," while 
ZerubbabePs long face and long prayers are held to be 
a ticket entitling him to the very highest seat in the 
kingdom of heaven. At the Monthly Concert for For- 
eign Missions the Rev. Dr. leads in prayer, and Brother 
Zerubbabel follows. Both ask the same thing, — the 
Christianization of heathen lands. But they do not 
mean that form of the Christian religion which is piety 
in the heart and morality in the outer life. They mean 
compliance with the popular theology, not the Christian 
religion proclaimed in those grand words, " Thou shalt 
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all 
thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind, 
and thy neighbor as thyself," and illustrated by a life as 
grand as the words. They mean the Christian formality, 
as set forth in the little creed, and illustrated by the 
lesser conduct, of a very mean, bigoted, and yet earnest 
and self-denying sect. 



192 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

Be not familiar with the idea of wrong, for sin in fancy 
mothers many an ugly fact. 



GREATNESS AND GOODNESS. 



Take goodness, with the average intellectual power, 
and compare it with mere greatness of intellect and so- 
cial standing, and it is far the nobler quality ; and if 
God should offer me one of them, I would not hesitate 
which to choose. No, the greatest intellect which God 
ever bestowed I would not touch, if I were bid to choose 
between that and the goodness of an average woman ; I 
would scorn it, and say, Give it to Lucifer, give me the 
better gift. When I say goodness is greater than great- 
ness, I mean to say it gives a deeper and serener joy in 
the private heart, joins men more tenderly to one another 
and more earnestly to God. I honor intellect, reason, 
and understanding ; I wish we took ten times more pains 
to cultivate them than we do. I honor greatness of 
mind, — great reason, which intuitively sees truths, 
great laws, and the like ; great understanding, which 
learns special laws, and works in details; — the under- 
standing that masters things for use and beauty, that can 
marshal millions of men into an organization that shall 
last for centuries. I once coveted such power, and am 
not wholly free from the madness of it yet. I see its 
use. I hope I am not ignorant of the joys of science 
and letters; I am. not of the pursuit of these. I bow 
reverently before the men of genius, and sit gladly at 
their feet. But the man who sees justice and does it, 
who knows love and lives it, who has a great faith and 
trust in God, — let him have a mind quite inferior, and 
a culture quite little, — I must yet honor and reverence 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 193 

that man far more than he who has the greatest power 
of intellect. I know that knowledge is power, and rev- 
erence it ; but justice is higher power, and love is a man- 
lier power, and religion is a diviner power ; each greater 
than the mightiest mind. 



THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL OF MANLY CHARACTER. 

To rest in mere thought is not satisfactory. So the 
natural man longs to put his thought into a thing. 
Action must complete it. What runs in his head must 
forth to run in the mill. No artist is contented with 
thinking a handsome figure ; what is in him must out, 
a statue or a picture. This faculty is in us all. 

Now there is one great feeling in us, namely, the de- 
sire for a perfect, manly character. It may be a dim 
feeling, but there it is, — the instinctive and spontaneous 
desire to be and to do all that nature demands, the most 
that we can be or do. In the human race the instinct 
of progress drives men ever forward, ever upward ; for 
though you and I may be sentimental and dreamy, the 
human race is no sentimentalist, but a fierce, hard 
worker. In the individual man this instinct is the de- 
sire of human perfection. Though often dim, now and 
then something stirs us to form an ideal. The picture 
of a complete man, — how fair it is in the young man's 
or woman's mind ! No painter or sculptor could ever 
fancy an ideal of the outward man beautiful enough to 
correspond to the ideal of a manly character which the 
young, earnest heart conceives. This is the child of our 
feeling and our thought. Shall it be only a thought? 
Shall this will be only a dream, to do nothing, to be noth- 
ing when the dream is over ? No, it must also be a 

13 



194 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

reality of character, not coming at one spasmodic act, 
but a deed that comes of us as the grass grows out of 
the ground, 

" Or as the sacred pine-tree adds 
To her old leaves new myriads." 

That is the end and expression of our ideal, that is the 
limit of our deepest feeling and our highest thought. 
If the feeling be strong, and the ideal just, it is amazing 
how much can be done in a small space. A very small 
stream, if it start high enough, will turn a great mill, if 
the machinery be made to suit. How unpromising a 
field for genius seemed the humble form of Scottish 
song ; but what a strange beauty did Burns put therein ! 
What a profane place was the Globe Theatre in the time 
of Elizabeth and stupid James, with its Merry Andrews, 
its clowns, its harlots, and its unspeakable obscenity ! 
What a pulpit was that out of which to preach manli- 
ness ! Bacon and Cudworth, the greatest minds of that 
age, never dared to look there to gain a single grain of 
inspiration and thought. But out of that unholy pulpit 
Shakespeare preached such manly piety, such actual 
humanity, as not England, nor Europe, nor the old classic 
religion, had ever heard before set forth in accents so 
divine. And if, with such accessories for his art, the 
poet could play such a part as principal, think you that 
any stage is too narrow to admit the entrance of the 
noblest character, and the performance of the drama of 
the greatest life ? I think penniless Socrates had not a 
very wide space, nor Jesus of Nazareth a very uncom- 
mon outlay of circumstances, to help him manufacture 
and display his character. Look round you, and see 
what characters have been formed in the humblest posi- 
tions of society, that have reached up to the topmost 
heaven of your thought and mine. 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 195 

Men talk of Christian architecture. I have seen the 
grand architecture of England, France, Germany, Italy. 
I bow down in admiration almost at its rare beauty. 
But the nicest piece of Christian architecture I ever saw 
was in this city the other day. A man whose face shows 
the beatitudes that are always in his heart, a grocer, 
with his own money and that of others builds a large 
and commodious edifice, parted off into reasonable tene- 
ments for the poor. I looked it over, and I said, I have 
been to Strasburgh Cathedral, I have seen Notre Dame 
and St. Peter's, but this is Christian architecture, the 
word of Christ become not flesh and blood, but stone and 
wood. 

If we have great thoughts and feelings, we must make 
them into life magnificently great, and then 

" Make channels for the streams of love 
Where they may broadly run, — 
And love has overflowing streams 
To fill them every one." 



THE FOUNDATION OP SELF-RESPECT. 

In forming a manly character, in endeavoring to attain 
the true end of manhood, one of the first things I would 
advise a man is this : Respect your own nature. But to 
do this, you must have things in you to respect. • 

Here is human nature to begin with. I may have but 
little, and another may have much, and a third much 
more. But it must be educated and developed and 
practised upon ; for if you do not cultivate your mind 
and other faculties, then, though you may respect your 
nature, you cannot trust it, and you must accordingly be 
a pensioner on other men for what your mind and con- 



196 TRAITS AND ILLUSTRATIONS OF 

science and heart and soul ought to bring, and you will 
end by being a slave. My mind may be very small, and 
yours great ; the whole of my spirit may be a thimble- 
full, and yours the great ocean-deep. But if I am true 
to my own, though never so little, I can respect myself 
as much as you ; and though my little craft must wait in 
the bay, while your great argosy ventures far out to sea, 
I can still have as much self-respect as you. By being 
thus true to my faculties, I get intellectual, moral, affec- 
tional, and religious independence of character. There 
is no real and lasting self-respect without this continual 
fidelity to your spirit ; no real self-respect without that 
fourfold piety, — the piety of the intellect, of the con- 
science, of the affections, and of the soul. There can 
be no real modesty before men without this; you may 
cringe and crouch, and be as humble as Uriah Heep in 
the story, but it will be in vain ; your modesty will be a 
cheat, your deference to others a trick, your humility 
hypocrisy, and a piece of cunning ; not natural sweetness 
and grace of affection running over your soul. This 
self-respect is consistent with the truest modesty. The 
man " suspects and still reveres himself." This respect 
is at variance with vanity, which fills its shallow maw 
with silly men's applause ; at variance with pride and 
haughtiness, the malignity of vanity ; with self-conceit, 
not thinking of itself more highly than it ought ; it is 
hostile to insolence ; but it is a sister virtue in that fair- 
faced family of loves, where Faith and Hope and Charity 
together dwell, and feed their sweet society with revela- 
tions from the living God. 



All personal beauty seems little when we see the 
virtues of a man, — only the shadow of that divine sub- 



HUMAN CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 197 

stance. The perfect symmetry which men ascribe to 
Jesus, the beauty of his form and face, — all that fades 
into nothing when we know that out of his own heart he 
could pronounce those beautiful beatitudes, and with his 
dying lips say, " Father, forgive them." 



TO WHAT END IS OUR LIFE ? 

There is an end of mortal life. Then we gather up 
the things we have accumulated in this world, they are 
added to our soul, and we carry them out of the world 
with us. Then no man will ever be sorry that in his 
youth he bowed his forehead to God in prayer ; no man 
will be sorry then that he clasped his hands in the in- 
stant of his resolution, and swore that he would rever- 
ence the dreams of his youth, and keep undefiled a 
conscience in his heart, and honor his God with a great 
life. This is sacramental and holy. Rejoice, young 
man, in the strength of thy life, and let thy heart cheer 
thee in the days of thy youth ! But remember that for 
all these things God continually calls you to account. 
Remember into what littleness men may make their 
lives taper off and vanish away, so that they come from 
riches and toil and honors with nothing in their hand 
that is worth gathering. Remember what an eternal 
joy a man may glean from a small field of life, and go 
home with the sheaves in his bosom, and be welcomed 
with a smile from his God. 

Of old time Michael Angelo took his copies from the 
persons in the streets, and wrought them out on the 
walls and the ceiling of the Vatican, changing a beggar 
into a giant, and an ordinary woman who bore a basket 
of flowers on her arm into an angel; and the beggar 



198 ILLUSTRATIONS OF CHARACTER AND CONDUCT. 

and flower-girl stand there now in their lustrous beauty, 
speaking to eyes that wander from every side of 
the green world. The rock slumbered in the moun- 
tain, and he reached his hands out and took it, and 
gathered the stones from the fields about him, and built 
them into that awful pile, which, covering acres on the 
ground, reaches up its mighty dome towards heaven, 
constraining the mob of the city to bow their foreheads 
and to vow great prayers to God. So, my brothers and 
my sisters, out of the common events of life, out of the 
passions put by God into your hearts, you may paint on 
the walls of your life the fairest figures, angels and 
prophets. Out of the common stones of your daily work 
you may build yourself a temple which shall shelter your 
head from all harm, and bring down on you the inspira- 
tion of God. 



PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 



THE DURATION OF THE FAMILY. 

THE family is the oldest institution in the world. It 
was a long time before there was a king, with his 
throne of power, or a priest, with an altar whereon to 
lay his sacrifice. Church and State came after mankind 
had been some time on the earth ; but the first genera- 
tion of men founded a family ; and the family will last 
forever. Forms of government constantly change ; des- 
potism gives way to a monarchy, the monarchy to a 
republic, and the republic also will pass by, and be suc- 
ceeded by brighter and nobler organizations of wisdom, 
justice, and love. Still the family subsists, knowing 
no revolution, only a gradual progress and elevation. 
Forms of religion are as mutable as the letters we write 
in the sand on the seashore ; Heathenism is gone, Juda- 
ism is gone, and what you and I call Christianity, as a 
limited form of religion, will also pass away. But all of 
wisdom, justice, love, and piety which any of these three 
forms has ever matured, will live forever after the name 
is lost. With this mutation and passing-away of forms 
of government and religion, the family remains always 
so, and will still subsist. After the last priest has bur- 
ied the last king in the ground, after the last stone of 
the pyramids has been exhaled to heaven as invisible va- 
por, when the mountain that has fallen has literally come 

199 



200 PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 

to nought and cannot be seen to the eye, — still the fam- 
ily must subsist, its roots in the primeval instincts of 
the human race. 



HOME. 

To most men, home is the dearest spot in the world. 
The home of our childhood, long after we become old 
men, is consecrated by the very tenderest of memories. 
There is still the cradle which rocked and sheltered us 
in its little nest, which was once the ark of a mother's 
hope. There is the little window where the sun came 
peeping in at morning, but never came a bit too soon, 
nor staid a bit too long. There were father and mother, 
— they still are there in our affection, — the tall parental 
mountains of humanity, so they seemed ; each stood at 
either end of our little Garden of Eden, the paradise 
where we were born, to defend us from the cold and 
bitter blasts of mortal life. There was the father, manly, 
earnest, toilworn, and industrious, whose daily sweat 
purchased for us a manly benediction on our daily bread. 
There, too, was the more venerable form of mother, the 
dearest name that mortal lips can ever speak. The 
Turk is right when he says that a man may have many 
a sister, many a wife, but only one mother. Doctor Ar- 
nold, one of the ablest and most religious Englishmen of 
the present age, says that he knows God only through 
Christ. I should respect him more if he had said he 
only knew God through his mother ; for the mother is 
still to the hungry heart of mortals the fairest, the holi- 
est incarnation of the ever-living, ever-loving God. It 
is she who feeds our body from her own body's life ; it 
is she who feeds our soul from her own spirit's life. She 
taught the feet to walk, the tongue to speak, guided our 



PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 201 

stammering lips. Her conscience went before us as a 
great wakening light, and it is through her that we first 
became acquainted with our Father, God. 

Every man that has ever had a home that was a home 
feels thus, I think, about the little roof that sheltered 
him in his childhood, and blessed the morning of his 
days. How gladly great and earnest men, who have 
gone out into the world and done battle there, — their life 
often a battle, — look back to the little roof that shel- 
tered them when they were children. The old man may 
be rich and his father have been never so poor ; he may 
dwell to-day in a palace, and have been born in a log- 
cabin in the mountains ; but the house which held his 
cradle is still the holiest temple of the affections to him. 
How men love to go back in fancy to the home of their 
childhood, if home it were. The old man leaps all at 
once, in his dreams, from his children, yes, from his 
grandchildren, to the time and place when he was a 
child, and a grandfather's hand was laid on his head, who 
is now himself a grandfather, or father of grandfathers 
even ; all the space between five generations is passed 
over at once, and he is a blessed boy again, his early 
home lingering in his venerable memory for all his mor- 
tal life, — the glad remembrance of brother and sister, 
the beautiful affection of uncles and aunts, who seemed 
a special providence of love, watching over him and 
dropping their balmy offerings in his expectant hand. 

Then to most men their actual home, not that which 
they inherit in their memories from their fathers' and 
mothers' love, but that which they have made out of 
their own love, is the centre of the world and its para- 
dise for them. There are those for whom we would lay 
down our lives, and be proud of the sacrifice, counting- 
it a delight, not a denial, a great triumph. There are 



202 PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 

the tenderest friends, whose daily intercourse beautifies 
us with the remembrance of mutual kindness and for- 
bearance. There husband and wife give and forgive, 
bear and forbear, — for the wedded life is ruled by the 
same elements as those that rule and checker the sky, 

"O'er which serene and stormy days 
With sway alternate go." 

There are the little olive-plants that spring about the 
table, there are brothers and sisters, and those not joined 
always by kindred blood, but by the tenderer tie of 
kindred soul. In families where only filial and parental 
love is the bond that joins, and not connubial love, there 
is the same attachment, tenderness, and fondness for 
home. 

In all our homes error has been, for blood ill-tempered 
vexes all but the rarest of men. There have been pain 
and penitence for the error, but mutual forgiveness 
brings a divine blossom out from the human weed. Sick- 
ness has been there, and pain has wrung the brow. 
There have been many a sorrow and tear for hope de- 
ferred, for mutual disappointment ; sorrow for the wrong 
we suffer, and worser sorrow for the wrong we do. 
Death has also been there, now joyous, now melancholy, 
— death giving a sacredness to the home, for the house 
in which one has never been born, or in which one has 
never been born to the other world, is only half a house ; 
it is a fancy of the carpenter and the painter, it waits 
for the finish of life. Life, too, is there, for the family 
is the gate of entrance to the mortal, and the gate of 
exit to the immortal world. 



PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 203 

MAREIAGE. 

In his enamoured hour, the young man puts a glass- 
bell over the young woman, then out of romance paints a 
maiden fairer than the romantic curving moon, endows 
her with virtues collected from written fictions and from 
his own dreams, and then loves the visionary angel. 
The young maiden does the same, only painting her ideal 
fairer than the young man his, with less austere traits 
than he puts upon her. By and by time breaks the bells, 
the mist of romance has vanished, the visionary angel 
has fled, and there are two ordinary mortals left, with 
good in each, ill in both, and they are to find out each 
other, and make the best of life they can. No doubt 
there is always a surprise to the most discreet and sober 
persons. There are ill things which we did not look for 
in our mates, in ourselves, but there are good things 
also unexpected. With brimming eyes the wife of five- 
years standing has sometimes said to me, when I asked 
intimately how her marriage sped, " I thought I knew 
him before you married us, but I did not know what a 
deep mine of noble things there was in him." And the 
husband of five-and-forty years standing has sometimes 
told me of the same discovery in his wife, when age had 
loosed the modest portals of the manly tongue, and the 
words came straightway from his heart. Perhaps the 
mutual surprise is as often a mutual pleasure as unex- 
pected disappointment. Men and women, and especially 
young people, do not know that it takes years to marry 
completely two hearts, even of the most loving and well- 
assorted. But nature allows no sudden change. We 
slope very gradually from the cradle to the summit of 
life. Marriage is gradual, a fraction of us at a time. A 
happy wedlock is a long falling in love. I know young 



204 PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 

persons think love belongs only to the brown hair, and 
plump, round, crimson cheek. So it does for its begin- 
ning, just as Mount Washington begins at Boston Bay. 
But the golden marriage is a part of love which the bri- 
dal day knows nothing of. Youth is the tassel and 
silken flower of love ; age is the full corn, ripe and solid 
in the ear. Beautiful is the morning of love with its 
prophetic crimson, violet, saffron, purple, and gold, with 
its hopes of days that are to come. Beautiful also is the 
evening of love, with its glad remembrances, and its 
rainbow side turned towards heaven as well as earth. 

Young people marry their opposites in temper and 
general character, and such a marriage is commonly a 
good match. They do it instinctively. The young man 
does not say, " My black eyes require to be wed with 
blue, and my over-vehemence requires to be a little 
modified with somewhat of dulness and reserve,' 7 — and 
when these opposites come together to be wed, they do 
not know it ; each thinks the other just like himself. 
Old people never marry their opposites ; they marry 
their similars, and from calculation. Each of these two 
arrangements is very proper. In their long journey, 
those young opposites will fall out by the way a great 
many times, and both get away from the road ; but each 
will charm the other back again, and by and by they will 
be agreed as to the place they will go to, and the road 
they will go by, and become reconciled. The man will be 
nobler and larger for being associated with so much hu- 
manity unlike himself, and she will be a nobler woman 
for having manhood beside her that seeks to correct her 
deficiencies, and supply her with what she lacks, if the 
diversity is not too great, and there be real piety and 
love in their hearts to begin with. The old bridegroom 



PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 205 

having a much shorter journey to take, must associate 
himself with one like himself. 

A perfect and complete marriage, where wedlock is 
every thing you could ask, and the ideal of marriage be- 
comes actual, is not common, perhaps is as rare as per- 
fect personal beauty. Men and women are married frac- 
tionally, now a small fraction, then a large fraction. Very 
few are married totally, and they only, I think, after 
some forty or fifty years of gradual approach and exper- 
iment. Such a large and sweet fruit is a complete mar- 
riage, that it needs a very long summer to ripen in, and 
then a long winter to mellow and season it. But a real, 
happy marriage, of love and judgment, between a noble 
man and woman, is one of the things so very handsome, 
that if the sun were, as the Greek poets fabled, a god, 
he might stop the world, and hold it still now and then, 
in order to look all day long on some example thereof, 
and feast his eyes with such a spectacle. 



ELEGANCE DOES NOT MAKE A HOME. 

I never saw a garment too fine for man or maid ; there 
was never a chair too good for a cobbler or cooper or 
king to sit in, never a house too fine to shelter the hu- 
man head. These elements about us, the gorgeous sky, 
the imperial sun, are not too good for the human race. 
Elegance fits man. But do we not value these tools of 
housekeeping a little more than they are worth, and 
sometimes mortgage a home for the sake of the mahog- 
any we would bring into it ? I had rather eat my dinner 
off the head of a barrel, or dress after the fashion of John 
the Baptist in the wilderness, or sit on a block all my 
life, than consume all myself before I got to a home, and 



206 PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 

take so much pains with the outside that the inside was 
as hollow as an empty nut. Beauty is a great thing, 
but beauty of garments, house, and furniture, is a very 
tawdry ornament compared with domestic love. All the 
elegance in the world will not make a home, and I would 
give more for a spoonful of real hearty love than for 
whole shiploads of furniture, and all the gorgeousness 
that all the upholsterers of the world could gather to- 
gether. 

* 

THE MOTHER'S INFLUENCE ON THE CHILD. 

The schoolmaster sees the mother's face daguerro- 
typed in the conduct and character of each little boy 
and girl. Nay, a chance visitor, with a quick eye, sees 
very plainly which child is daily baptized in the tranquil 
waters of a blessed home, and which is cradled in vio- 
lence and suckled at the bosom of a storm. Did you 
ever look at a little pond on a sour, dark day in March ? 
How sullen the swampy water looked. The shore pouted 
at the pond, and the pond made mouths at the land ; and 
how the scraggy trees, cold and bare-armed, scowled 
over the edge ! But look at it on a bright day in June, 
when great rounding clouds, all golden with sunlight, 
checker the heavens, and seem like a great flock of sheep 
which the good God is tending in that upland pasture of 
the sky, and then how different looks that pond, — the 
shores all green, the heavens all gay, and the pond laughs 
right out and blesses God. As the heaven over the 
water, so a mother broods over the family, March or 
June, just as she will. 



PHASES OP DOMESTIC LIFE. 207 

THE WILL TO BE TRAINED, NOT BROKEN. 

Men often speak of breaking the will of a child ; but 
it seems to me they had better break the neck. The 
will needs regulation, not destroying. I should as soon 
think of breaking the legs of a horse in training him, as 
a child's will. I would discipline and develop it into 
harmonious proportions. I never yet heard of a will in 
itself too strong, more than of an arm too mighty, or a 
mind too comprehensive in its grasp, too powerful in its 
hold. 

The instruction of children should be such as to ani- 
mate, inspire, and train, but not to hew, cut, and carve ; 
for I would always treat a child as a live tree, which was 
to be helped to grow, never as dry, dead timber, to be 
carved into this or that shape, and to have certain mould- 
ings grooved upon it. A live tree, and not dead timber, 
is every little child. 



ILL TEMPER. 

A single person of a sour, sullen temper, — what a 
dreadful thing it is to have such a one in a house ! 
There is not myrrh and aloes and chloride of lime 
enough in the world to disinfect a single home of such 
a nuisance as that. No riches, no elegance of mien, 
no beauty of face, can ever screen such persons from 
utter vulgarity. There is one thing which rising per- 
sons hate the reputation of more than all others, and that 
is vulgarity ; but, trust me, ill temper is the vulgar est 
thing that the lowest born and illest bred can ever 
bring to his home. It is one of the worst forms of 
impiety. Peevishness in a home is not only sin against 



208 PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 

the Holy Ghost, but sin against the Holy Ghost in the 
very temple of love. 



GOOD TEMPER. 



I am surprised that intelligent men do not see the 
immense value of good temper in their homes ; and am 
amazed that they will take such pains to have costly 
houses and fine furniture, and yet neglect to bring home 
with them good temper. Depend upon it, this is the 
most valuable thing a man can send home or keep at 
home. Is well-polished mahogany so much more valu- 
able than a well-tempered man or woman, that we must 
make so much sacrifice for the former, and so little for 
the latter, as we do oftentimes ? A feast of nightingales' 
tongues, after the classic sort, is very poor beside a feast 
of pleasant words from kind hearts full of mutual love, 
each assuming the other better than himself. 



INTEMPERANCE IN THE FAMILY. 

Shall I tell you how Poverty comes in at the door 
when Intemperance looks out at the window, and makes 
the wife shiver and peak and pine, and the children 
dwindle, and their faces look sad and prematurely old ? 
The careful stranger, going into a village school for the 
first time, with unerring certainty picks out the drunk- 
ard's children; not by their dress, for though rum stains 
it, the wife's diligence takes it out ; but he reads it in 
the corners of the child's mouth, in his eye, and in the 
drooping cheek ; he sees signs of the sorrow, and the 
agony, and the bloody sweat, which God meant to try 



PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 209 

heroes with, and great men, which he never meant for 
blameless babes. Shall I tell of the wife, — the domestic 
effect of intemperance on her, — the suspicion kept from 
her own consciousness at first, then a belief of her hus- 
band's shame only manifest in her weeping prayers to 
God, and in a tenderer yearning towards him who de- 
serves her love the less, but gets her pity more ? Shall 
I speak of the full conviction of her husband's shame, 
of the effort still to screen his infirmity from the public 
gaze ? All that I have seen a hundred times, and you 
have seen it too. I have heard of armed men rushing 
into the battle's seven-fold heat, and bringing out a 
brother, a friend, a general, or a king ; but woman's 
loyal heart defends her falling husband from worse foes. 
With naked breast, she goes into that fight, the most 
hopeless and cruellest of battles, to screen a husband 
from the world's well-merited scorn. So she lives, mar- 
ried, but the saddest of widows, till one day the clods 
of the valley are sweet to her, and the same bells that 
rung joyfully at the half-marriage, thought to be a 
whole one, now toll at the only real wedlock she has 
known, the union of her body to the grave and her soul 
to God. But the husband knows not of the cruel suffer- 
ing he has caused, whereby he slowly murdered her, 
nor cares that his daughters and sons are walking 
monuments through the streets, of that same horrid 
death which yet the earth relucts from, and will not 
hide within her breast. 



VIRTUE BEGINS AT HOME. 

Piety is the beauty of life everywhere. It is beau- 
tiful in the court, in the senate-house, in the mechanic's 

14 



210 PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 

shop, at the farmer's plough, but its sweetest and fairest 
face it puts on at home. So a star shines beautiful for 
all the world, a great public light ; but it shines fairer, 
looks larger, and comes nearer, when you see it out of 
a window in a narrow street in the city, and Sirius 
or Lyra thus seen looks down upon you with fuller, 
sweeter, diviner light. 

Home is the place wherein we must cultivate all the 
narrow virtues which cannot bear the cold atmosphere 
of the outward world. If we are to reform the church, 
the state, business, or war, we need great ideas trum- 
peted abroad ; but we must come home at last to teach 
the baby in its mother's arms. It is in the house that 
we must rear up those tender plants which are one day 
to be a hedge to keep the world of wickedness out of 
the garden of our civilization. We want great and good 
men. Where shall we find them ? Here and there in 
society you find one. Study his history, trace him back 
through the beginning of his professional life, through 
college, academy, and school, and at last you find where 
that great Amazonian river of excellence took its rise. 
It was in his mother's arms ; thence he received the 
piety, there he got the magnanimity which stands him 
in such stead, and arms him that he faints not and never 
fails. 

Mrs. Motherly has lived many years a wife, many a 
mother, grandmother even. She is as industrious as the 
good woman in the Book of Proverbs, and her husband's 
large estate is as much of her saving as of his getting. 
What housekeeping is hers, where there is plenty, neat- 
ness, order, regularity, nothing wasted. She is early 
up, not early down. How busy those fingers are, how 
nice those stitches seem ! How thoughtful she is, with 
no idle gossip, with serious thought, sound sense, hand- 



PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 211 

some wit ! What exact judgment ! How she trains her 
children, — well educated all of them ; some at college, 
some for trades, all for work, hand and head work. Her 
daughters both know and do. But she has educated 
her husband as well as her children. Much of his 
integrity was hers first ; a great deal of the benevo- 
lence which makes him honored in the gate was her 
benevolence ; he holds by courtesy in his name, but 
by his wife's right; she showed him that love of God 
meant love of man ; and that religious life lasted seven 
days out of the week. She trained up her children, 
fed them from her bosom, from her soul also. How 
charitable she is ! " She went and did it," the neighbors 
say, " while we were talking about it." The house is so 
full of affection that it runs over, and goes all round the 
town. She is one of the Lord's servants to do kindly 
deeds, and is worth two or three New-Testament angels, 
who only come on great occasions ; she is a human 
angel, of the church of the Good Samaritan. She has 
children on earth, grandchildren ; children also in 
heaven ; and in her evening prayer they all gather 
about her, like the angels about St. Cecilia, half on 
earth, half in heaven. How handsome her face is now ! 
not in feature, but in expression, — a New-England face, 
full of Christian graces ; the Bible is not fuller of trust 
in God than her face is written all over with the good 
deeds she has done. How venerable that face, full of 
half a century and more of noble religious life ! Her 
children also rise up and call her blessed. 



212 PHASES OF DOMESTIC LIFE. 

PIETY AT HOME. 

Religion is majestic in the state ; it may be grand in 
the church, — in the church building a great institution, 
in the state swaying the destinies of millions of men. 
But piety looks lovelier and sweeter at home ; not 
arrayed in her court dress, not set off in her church 
regimentals, but dressed in her homely week-day, work- 
day clothes. It is a little striking that the word piety, 
which so often rings in the Christian Church, is men- 
tioned only once in the English Bible, and then coupled 
with the admonition to show itself first at home. 



EDUCATION. 




THE VALUE OF EDUCATION. 

'ERE we are, my friends, to work for our daily bread. 
That is no curse, — say Genesis what it may. 
But there is another work to be done at the same time, 
that is, to build up an intellectual character. It would not 
be pleasant to have for an epitaph, " This man got money, 
and nothing more." It would be worse to be yourself a 
tombstone, and be followed in life with this living epi- 
taph about you. Yet there are such men, so building 
themselves. 

How much we can do for ourselves in this matter of 
education ! An educated man doubles his estate in a 
few years ; but he may double himself, his personal pow- 
er, perhaps in less time, and so will multiply the higher 
modes of joy. That is not all. He blesses others while 
he cheers himself. Each spot you justly cultivate en- 
riches the continent, salubrities the air, and improves its 
temperature ; and so each man who justly cultivates his 
mind, the one bright spot of verdure, salubrities the con- 
sciousness of men. He is one more worker on the side 
of material comfort ; one more apostle of the true, the 
beautiful, and the good, faring forth, commissioned by 
his God to evangelize the world. A well-instructed 
man, with mind enlarged, and conscience, and heart, and 
soul developed, is a safeguard and defence, a fortress 
and high tower. Such a one aids the great work we all 

213 



214 EDUCATION. 

pray for, which the noblest men have labored to bring to 
pass, which Christ died for. No one of these has ever 
wrought in vain, nor does, nor ever shall. The fruit of 
your fidelity, — you enjoy it here j you enjoy an apple, 
it may be, plucked from the tree of knowledge. You 
take it with you also when you go hence. And the seed, 
love, shall spring up, and become a tree to feed, and 
heal, and gladden the nations of the world for many a 
thousand years to come. 



EXPERIMENTS. 

All man's conscious activity is at first an experi- 
ment — an undertaking of which the result is not known 
until after the trial. All experiment is liable to mistake. 
There are many ways of doing a thing, but only one way 
of doing it best ; and it is not likely that every individ- 
ual of the human race will hit the right way the first 
time of trying. What succeeds we keep and it becomes 
the habit of mankind. I take it, all the experiments 
ever made, however ruinous to the individual man, have 
to the human race been worth all they cost, and it was 
not possible for the human race to have learned at a 
cheaper school than that dear one which experience has 

taught. 

* 

EDUCATIONAL VALUE OP INDUSTRY. 

The outward value of industry we see very plainly ; 
but its educational value, that is the thing really of the 
greatest importance. All the life of mankind has been 
school-time ; all the industry of mankind has been educa- 
tion for the body and spirit j all the tools of the human 



EDUCATION. 215 

race, from the crooked stick which caught the first fish 
to the last magnificent clock, are instruments for the ed- 
ucation of mankind. But it was not human wit that 
established this great school. Oh no, far from that. 
Men asked for bread and cloth, but in getting those they 
grew wiser and better. The plan of the world's educa- 
tion lay in the vast mind of the Infinite God. I have 
often tried to tell how the influence of nature leads you 
to admire the wisdom of God ; and that spectacle is 
truly a brave one. But you cannot study the history of 
a single tool man works with but you are amazed at the 
wisdom of God which made that tool, by which man 
feeds his mind at the same time he feeds his mouth. 

See how work is education. The industrious boy, 
with active body and mind, goes to learn a trade. It is 
only the actual trade the father thinks of, but every tool 
the boy learns to master helps his intellectual develop- 
ment. The attempts made to improve the cattle of New 
England have improved the farmer more than his stock. 
Every bettering of a working tool is a bettering of the 
workman. The use of cattle in the rude ages is to be 
set down among the instructions of the human race. 
You see the effect of labor in the rude Irishmen who 
come here to us ; it is the great- school for them, for the 
head and hand must work together. You may see the 
educational effect of this in New England in an eminent 
degree. Here is great industrial activity, and hence 
there is a great amount of thought, growth, development 
of mind. The introduction of manufactures into New 
England has done more for the head of the people than 
for their purse. Demand a skilful hand, it must needs 
have a skilful head likewise. Labor has been the great 
school for the education of mankind. The brute labor, 
the military labor, the positive productive labor of our 



01 

-.1 



G EDUCATION. 



times, — these only mark three great classes in the man- 
ual-labor school of the world. We ask only for the ma- 
terial result, poor ignorant children as we are ; but the 
Infinite God gives us also the spiritual training of our 
higher powers, something that we know not of. 

Different kinds of industry have different educational 
values. The higher the work is, the higher the power 
it demands, and the more education it gives. The more 
complicated the instrument which the man learns to mas- 
ter, the more thought it calls for, the greater the power 
it develops. Thus all the higher callings of mankind 
are instruments to elevate men to higher and higher ed- 
ucation. We seek them first for the material purpose, 
but the good God uses them for a spiritual purpose, 
making the cupidity and the vanity, as well as the wrath 
of man, serve his infinite design. With us in New Eng- 
land there is a continual effort of earnest men to engage 
in the higher forms of industry, and so there comes a 
distaste for brute labor ; and so the American youth is 
pressed into such callings as demand skilful labor. As 
fast as we get tired of brute labor, we bring in nature's 
forces to do it for us. Advertise for brute labor which 
demands nothing but a strong arm, force of muscles, and 
the uneducated foreigner applies for that place ; adver- 
tise for skilled labor, and the educated New-Englander 
comes to the place. So a crowd of cultivated applicants 
press into all the high places of human toil, and there is 
an intense activity of body and mind to accomplish these 
material purposes. Once only war could sting and drive 
men to such activity as business demands every day 
now. We are up early and lie down late, busy with 
hand, and with head busier yet. We ask only material 
power ; but the good God throws us in spiritual power. 



EDUCATION. 217 

Men do not very well understand what a great check 
the want of material means is to the development of the 
rudest class of men in society. They know that poverty 
is want of bread, want of shelter, want of clothes, want 
of warmth ; they do not see that it must necessarily 
be also want of wisdom, want of justice, want of love, 
want of piety, want of manly development; and that 
this is the great misery of want. 



ALL MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL FORCES FOR MAN'S BENEFIT. 

Where all work is done by the hands of men, mankind 
is poor, and spiritual development is poor ; only few men 
have comfort, elegance, beauty ; and fewer still have in- 
tellectual education, and manly use and enjoyment of 
their powers. Now we have wind, water, fire, electrici- 
ty, steam ; these do our work, and leave the hands free. 
The power of machinery in England alone is greater 
than the physical power of all the inhabitants of the 
earth. The three million people of New England at this 
day, with their power over material things, have got a 
greater productive force than the four hundred millions 
of Chinese. This industry will be so productive one 
day that mankind will be rich enough to afford means of 
culture for intellect, conscience, heart, and soul to every 
child born. Hitherto this immense force of machinery 
has done little for the mass of men ; it has raised them 
absolutely, but in some countries has not elevated them 
relatively. The day-laborer of England to-day is far 
behind the capitalist of four hundred years ago. In 
America this is not so ; but the complicated and costly 
machinery generally has not lessened the hours of toil 
for those who do the work. It is destined however to 



218 EDUCATION. 

have this effect, and already it begins to accomplish it. 
The practice of working but ten hours a clay, which has 
become universal in all the large towns, and will soon 
spread over all the country, is one sign of it, and marks the 
turn of the tide, which set always before in one direction. 
There will doubtless be a great extension of this power of 
machinery. Nature is full of forces waiting to serve us 
and do our work, and leave us free to apply our time to 
higher purposes of toil. More servants wait on man 
than he will take notice of. Once the river was only a 
boundary between states ; now it is a great productive 
power. Once steam was only a boy's plaything ; now it 
crosses the ocean, spins and weaves, and serves us in a 
thousand ways. These are but a hundredth part of the 
mighty forces nature holds in her bosom, waiting to give 
to him that is ready to take. 

It is a thing possible that all work of the human race 
shall one day become as educational and as attractive as 
the work of the poet and naturalist is to them. Then 
there will be no drudgery in the world ; and I think there 
are steps taken towards that point. When the science 
of the ablest mind is directed to securing the welfare of 
all men, to distributing the best gifts of civilization to 
all, then what results are possible to us all ! Then as so 
much power of production, and so much of spiritual 
power, comes from the organization of a thought in the 
material world, how much more will come from the or- 
ganization of a thought in man. We see the power of 
men organized in an army, where the energy of the 
ablest directs the bodies of a hundred thousand men to 
the work of destruction. We see the power of men or- 
ganized in a church like the Catholic, in a state like the 
English, in a community like the Jesuits, where the or- 
ganization is not for the good of all. We see the power 



EDUCATION. 219 

of organization for commercial purposes in a bank, for 
productive energy in a manufactory. One day we shall 
have the accumulated riches, power, wisdom, justice, 
love, and piety of mankind organized by the wisdom, 
justice, love, and piety of some new Messiah, organized 
in society, which shall secure the welfare of all men ; 
and we shall have a society which shall bear the same 
relation to the absolute religion of the Infinite God 
which the community of the Jesuits bears to the Roman 
church and the Pope. Then there will be an industry 
so great that there will be a material basis sufficient 
for the spiritual development of every child. Then all 
these results of material civilization will be for all men, 
not merely for a few. Then all industry will be attrac- 
tive and educational, and the material and spiritual riches 
of mankind be spread broadcast, like the blessed air and 
sunlight of God on the earth. 



THE NEED OF HIGHER EDUCATION. 

All the life of a child, and of a man, is educational, 
no doubt. The baby's hunger for its food, its struggles 
against such as would oppose its infantile caprice, the 
young man's hunger and struggle for other things, the 
trials of passion, the trials of ambition, — all these are 
educational, and the worth of such school-time is obvious 
enough. So all the life of the human race is doubtless 
school-time, and all its struggle against material want 
and against human rapacity is educational. We have 
teachers who address different faculties, and give differ- 
ent lessons, — Want, with its terrible ushers, War, Sla- 
very, Ignorance, Fraud, Prostitution ; many-liveried Sin 
is a rough schoolmaster in the primary school of man- 



220 EDUCATION. 

kind's education. These teach slowly, and we learn 
very hard under such tutelage. Religion, with her 
sweet-faced helpers, Piety, Morality, Beauty, Plenty, 
Wisdom, keeps school for her more advanced pupils, 
who under such tutelage learn gladly and fast, and have 
a higher delight in the enjoyment of higher faculties 
thus brought into work. 

Tn consequence of the youth of mankind, and the in- 
experience consequent thereon, there is a great lack of 
development of the higher faculties of man ; and his 
happiness is always proportioned, first, to the greatness 
of the faculties which are used, and, next, to the com- 
pleteness of their exercise and satisfaction. So there 
is a great want of the higher modes of happiness 
amongst men everywhere. The general modes of life 
quicken mainly the inferior spiritual faculties of man, 
not the superior. The public educational forces, busi- 
ness, politics, literature, preaching, do not tend directly 
to produce noble men, men of great mind and conscience, 
and heart and soul. Men like Jesus of Nazareth are ex- 
ceptional. There is not much machinery in the world 
that is calculated to turn out men of that stamp. Nay, 
men like Washington and Franklin are exceptional ; now 
exceptional by birth, born with genius ; then exceptional 
by culture, bred under uncommonly favorable circum- 
stances. Even physical beauty is the result of excep- 
tional circumstances ; it is not instantial in any nation, 
in any tribe, or in any family of men ; all Christendom 
is a set of homely folks to-day. Men are contented with 
this state of things, because they form a low estimate of 
human nature, and do not know what great things we 
are capable of and meant for. Less than a hundred 
years ago, three hundred women sat the longest day of 
summer on Boston Common, and spun with three hun- 



EDUCATION. 221 

dred several wheels, and at the day's end they had a few 
hanks of cotton and linen thread and woollen yarn, and 
they were well content with their day's work. But 
when it was found out that any lazy brook in New Eng- 
land, if set properly to work, could spin more in a day 
than all these three hundred women in a month, not a 
woman was satisfied to trundle with her foot, and turn 
with her hand, the wheel, on Boston Common or in her 
house. And just as the power of the brook lay sleeping 
there, and waiting to be set to work, so do greater pow- 
ers in man than are yet developed lie sleeping and wait- 
ing to spring to their toil. 



INTELLECTUAL CULTURE. 

The greatest man New England ever bred or bore 
once pointed out the "way to make money plenty in 
every man's pocket." If some one greater than Dr. 
Franklin should show how to make wisdom plenty in 
every man's head, what a service that Poor. Richard of 
the soul would render to mankind ; for then money also, 
power over matter, would be abundant enough, and what 
is a great deal costlier than all money. But as yet I fear 
that few persons are aware of the vast treasure which 
God has given in this mind of ours, with its threefold 
grandeur of understanding, imagination, and reason, — 
its practical, poetic, and philosophic power. Yery few 
men seem to know to what extent this mind is capable 
of culture and improvement. 

The ground under our feet is capable of indefinite bet- 
tering. Nobody has yet found a limit to its power to 
produce either use or beauty. From his acres no farmer 
has ever compelled the uttermost blade of corn, or 



222 EDUCATION. 

coaxed the last violet, so that the land shall say to the 
husbandman, " Hold, there ! This is my very best. I 
can no further, — so help me God." There is always 
room for another blade of corn, and another violet. Man 
is the schoolmaster for nature, and the elements learn. 
What an odds betwixt the agricultural power of New 
England to-day and three hundred years ago, between 
the land of forests and the land of farms ! And yet we 
are not near the limit of this productive power. " To- 
morrow to fresh fields and pastures new," says every 
farmer and gardener. 

To the human mind there is no limit, conceivable to us. 
In many generations savage humanity comes up to a Soc- 
rates or an Aristotle. Humanity does not stop there ; 
it takes a new departure, and rises again, — for a man of 
genius is only one twig on the world's tree, where the 
highest bird of humanity alights for a moment, and with 
her beak plumes her wings for a higher flight. Aristotle 
and Socrates only got so far as they could in threescore 
years and ten, not so far as humanity could in threescore 
years and ten ; nay, not so far as themselves can reach 
in seventy times seven years ; for I take it the old 
philosopher who ceased to be mortal some three and 
twenty hundred years ago, drinking the wicked hemlock 
which was his city's reward to him for being the wisest 
man in all the round earth, is but the feeblest infant 
compared to the vast philosopher he has expanded into, 
in the centuries that have since passed by. Taking, 
therefore, the immortal nature of man into consideration, 
as well as his mortal, there is no limit conceivable to his 
power of growth and expansion. 

This intellectual culture is of great value. First, it is 
a means of power over nature, and heuce of comfort, of 
riches, of beauty. Money is the conventional represen- 



EDUCATION. 223 

tative of value, but mind is the actual creator of value. 
Wisdom, — it is bread, it is beauty, it is protection, it is 
all forms of riches, in fact or in possibility. Thought is 
power over matter; thereby we put want at defiance. 
Do you wish to increase the riches of America, of Massa- 
chusetts, to enlarge the amount of food, houses, clothes, 
means of comfort and ornament ? Cultivate the mind ; it 
is practical power. Do you wish to put national poverty 
at defiance ? Enlarge the power of thought. The mind 
of New England runs through the schoolhouse, and then 
jumps over the ditch of poverty, where lie Spain, Italy, 
Portugal, Ireland, and many another country that never 
took its start by the run in the schoolhouse, and so 
failed to leap the ditch, and there lies to perish. The 
wisest individuals are seldom the richest persons ; but 
the wisest nations are always the wealthiest. But this 
is the very lowest use of wisdom. Yet it is indispensa- 
ble ; it prepares the material basis whereon high charac- 
ter is to rest, and be builded up. 

Wisdom is able to help the higher forms of human de- 
velopment. It is valuable as money ; it is more valuable 
likewise as manhood. The power of mind is itself an 
end, furnishing wonderful and elevating delights ; but it 
is likewise a means to the higher development of quali- 
ties nobler than the mere intellect. 

But as an end, the delight of intellectual power, of 
thought, of reflection, of imagination, of reason, — what 
a grand and noble satisfaction it is ! It is a sublime 
pleasure to read this great book of Nature, the Old Tes- 
tament of God, written not on two, but on millions of 
tables of stone, all illuminated with those diagrams of 
fire, that burn night after night all round the world ; to 
know the curious economy whereby a rose grows out of 
the dark ground, and is beautiful all over and fragrant 



224 EDUCATION. 

all through ; to learn the curious chemistry whereby na- 
ture produces green and golden ornaments, fed by the 
same ground, watered by the same clouds, and furnished 
into such various beauty by the same sunlight which 
they absorb and reflect. 

What a glorious thing it is to understand this New 
Testament of God, the nature of man, his past, his pres- 
ent, and his future ; to understand the more curious 
physiology of the human spirit, and that marvellous 
chemistry of mind, metaphysics, psychology, ontology, 
whereby we build us up the beings that we are, flame 
into flowers more radiant and more fragrant than any 
rose wrapped in its cloth of gold. 

The man of letters has the sublime joy of welcoming 
the income of new thought to his mind, of creating new 
forms thereof. Homer, wandering from town to town, — 
how delighted his heart must have been with such a 
paradise of poetry coming up, growing, blossoming, 
bearing fruit in his masterly mind. Poor Scotch Burns, 
in the midst of his wretchedness, caused by wantonness 
and drink, consoled himself with " the vision and the fac- 
ulty divine " of the poet, the " accomplishment of verse " 
embalming his thought in such lovely forms that man- 
kind will never let them perish, nor break off a thread 
therefrom. How great are the delights of science, to 
the naturalist, the astronomer, the geologist. Entranced 
in his toilsome studies, Newton forgot the heat, forgot 
the cold, was careless of day and night, and the untastecl 
food for breakfast, for dinner, and for supper, came be- 
fore him, and before him went ; he touched it not. Toil 
was it? Ay, it was the toil of heaven. It was God's 
toil, it was itself a beatitude. 

But this exalted enjoyment is for but few persons. 
Few creators are there in literature or in science. 



EDUCATION. 225 

There is only one Homer, but a great swarm of imita- 
tors, commentators, and translators. Let us not find 
fault with them. They cut off a scion from the great 
poetic tree, carry it abroad, and plant it in other lands, 
where it shall grow, and thousands shall gladden at its 
sight, and pause, and pitch their tents in its welcome 
and blessed shade. It is a great joy to take thought at 
second-hand. Then men rejoice in what others discover 
and create. You may enjoy society, without being 
father and mother to all your acquaintance. The pleas- 
ures of the intellect not creative, but only recipient, 
have never been fully appreciated. What a joy is there 
in a good book, writ by some great master of thought, 
who breaks into beauty, as in summer the meadow into 
grass and dandelions and violets, with geraniums, and 
manifold sweetness. As an amusement, that of reading 
is worth all the rest. What pleasure in science, in lit- 
erature, in poetry, for any man who will but open his 
eye and his heart to take it in. What delight an audi- 
ence of men, who never speak, take in some great orator, 
who looks into their faces, and speaks into their hearts, 
and then rains a meteoric shower of stars, falling from 
his heaven of genius before their eyes ; or, far better 
still, with a whole day of sunlight warms his audience, 
so that every manly and womanly excellence in them 
buds and blossoms with fragrance, one day to bear most 
luscious fruit before God, fruit for mortality, fruit for 
eternity not less. I once knew a hard-working man, a 
farmer and mechanic, who in the winter-nights rose a 
great while before day, and out of the darkness coaxed 
him at least two hours of hard study, and then, when the 
morning peeped over the eastern hills, he yoked his oxen 
and went forth to his daily work, or in his shop he 
labored all day long; and when the night came, he read 

15 



226 EDUCATION. 

aloud some simple book to his family ; but when they 
were snugly laid away in their sleep, the great-minded 
mechanic took to his hard study anew ; and so, year out 
and year in, he went on, neither rich nor much honored, 
hardly entreated by daily work, and yet he probably had 
a happiness in his heart and mind which the whole coun- 
try might have been proud to share. 

It is only a small class of men who have much time 
for literature or science. The class that has most is not 
the most fortunate nor the happiest. Some persons 
mourn at this ; but you do not wish the whole world to 
be run over with medical plants, or roses and anemones ; 
it must be mainly set with grass for the cattle and corn 
for men. There will always be twenty thousand farmers 
for one botanist, a million readers for one great creative 
poet. With the mass of men to-day their life is devoted 
to industry, — the creation or traffic in material things. 
To mankind, literature and science are only the little 
dainty garden under the window, where, in her spare 
time, the noble farmer's daughter cultivates her great 
hollyhocks and marigolds, or little plants at their foot, 
dainty mignonette, heart's-ease, and forget-me-not, to 
cheer her father, all foredone with toil, or to signify to 
her lover what fragrant affection she bears for him, and 
how she thinks of him when far away, while watering 
her forget-me-nots with her love, not less than with 
water drawn from the well; or therein she cultivates 
choice herbs, to take away the grief of a wound, or to 
lengthen out the little span of human life. So, to the 
mass of men, literature and science are not the web of 
life ; they are only the little fringe, an ornament which 
hangs round its borders. 

But what a delight power of thought gives to the com- 
monest occupations of life, though it may not exhibit 



EDUCATION. 227 

itself in power of speech. The man of letters utters 
words, the man of business things. Corn and cattle are 
the farmer's words, houses are the language of the car- 
penter, locomotives are the iron-worker's speech, and the 
wares of the merchant are the utterance of his mental 
calculation. There is a great mistake in respect to this 
matter. The sophomore at college, who knows very 
poorly the grammars of some half a dozen tongues, and 
can speak and write without violating the rules of the 
King's English, thinks his cousin and uncle, who cannot 
talk five minutes without violating the King's English, 
are very poorly educated. But the power of thought is 
one part of culture, and the power of speech is only 
another. I do not say that we overrate the power of 
speech ; we underrate the power of thought. I once 
knew a grocer, who knew the history of all the articles 
in his wealthy shop, whence they came, how they were 
produced, for what they were useful. He made his shop 
a library, and got as much science, ay, as much poetry, 
out of it as many a scholar from his library' of books. 
He was a grocer ; but he was also a man in the grocery 
business, which is another thing. So the farmer, builder, 
smith, may get a grand culture from his calling. It is 
only the mistake of men, and the poverty of the world's 
civilization, which would limit the power of thought to 
any class of men. One day mankind will be wise and 
rich enough to enable everybody to start with a great 
capital of culture. Then we shall find that the com- 
monest callings of life are as educational as the callings 
of the minister, the doctor, and the lawyer, and other 
avocations which we now call liberal. 

But what an odds is there in the power of thought 
amongst men in the common callings of life. I suppose 
there are a thousand young men in Boston, between 



228 EDUCATION. 

twenty and thirty years of age, salesmen, clerks, and the 
like, with no inherited or accumulated property, their 
body and skill their only estate. They earn from three 
hundred and fifty to a thousand dollars a year, and spend 
the whole of their income. When thirty years old they 
will not have a cent more property than when twen- 
ty, except what consists in fine clothes, opera-glasses, 
watches, rings, and other articles of show. They have 
no books, and very little intellectual culture. They are 
up late at night, down very late in the morning. They 
know all the opera-dancers and the reputation of actors ; 
but if you were to ask them whether Samuel Adams 
was born and bred in Boston or Savannah, they would 
scarcely know ; or whether the Pilgrims landed on Ply- 
mouth Rock before Columbus discovered America, or 
some hundred years after. You smile, — but what a 
dark side there is to it all. Trace such a young man 
through life, his public career in the shop where he 
unwillingly passes his time and earns his money, his pri- 
vate career through the theatre, dram-shop, and brothel, 
till at last he comes to the grave, a worthless fragment 
of humanity. But this is not all. You cannot be a fool 
but a hundred others must smart for your folly ; and the 
bitter execrations which the writer of the Book of Prov- 
erbs launches on the head of the fool, apply to the fool 
in morals, not to the simpleton. They are well deserved, 
and the human race knows how true they are. 

Now and then you see one who resolves also to be a 
man. He wastes little on ornament outwardly, is not 
distinguished by his gay apparel ; he wears angel's gar- 
ments next to his soul. He masters his business, knows 
all its details, the history of the articles he traffics in, 
makes his shop serve his mind, while it pays a profit 
also to his purse. He lives in his reason, in his imagi- 



EDUCATION. 229 

nation, as well as in his appetites. Which gets the most 
delight in his life, this man, or the man who is the slave 
of his senses? 

Many years ago, a noble young man was born of one 
of the poorest families in this State. He served for 
a time in a ship-chandler's shop in a wealthy town, and 
did the service in the family of his master, living in the 
kitchen. Sometimes a stranger in the family would ask, 
" What's Nat doing ? " and some one would reply, with 
a smile of ridicule, u He's making his almanac." It was 
an almanac whereby the boy Bowditch, thirteen years 
old, in a ship-chandler's kitchen, was learning the les- 
sons which God is teaching in the heavens. He kept 
his own time, knew the quadrature ; full of thought, the 
mutations of his intellect were recorded therein. But 
when the master of a ship, sailing through the darkness, 
the light burning in the binnacle, there was a brighter 
light that burned in his little cabin, where he was build- 
ing up the great manhood which is now one of the orna- 
ments of his town, his state, his nation, and the world. 

For the first lessons in thought and the right use of 
the mind, the child must depend on his parents, and 
especially on the mother. Woman is the oldest school- 
master, mother of bodies, mother also of the cultivated 
mind, — body and soul feeding on the mother's breast, 
which colors the mortal thought for fourscore years. 
What a difference between the girl born and bred in a 
family of thinking, well-cultivated men and women, and 
one of a family with no education, no desire for it, no 
thought. A vast estate, a great house, rich furniture, 
teachers of dancing, music, mathematics, language, paint- 
ing, history, philosophy, — I would give them all for one 
good, refined, elevated, noble woman, to cradle her little 
immortals, not only in her bounteous lap, but also in 



230 EDUCATION. 

her affluent mind. The formation of the character is a 
mighty trust God gives into woman's hands, and very 
fortunate it is that she has such a superiority in many 
nice matters. 

What a difference there is in the culture men and 
women get. Here is a young woman of showy accom- 
plishments, who chatters, and frolics, and plays a quick- 
step, and sings an Ethiopian song. She has pert wit, a 
shallow soul, is idle and vulgar-minded. Poor young 
woman ! I know your history. Some foolish young 
man will one day call you wife ; there will be a commu- 
nication of -gifts, the congratulation of hollow-hearted 
friends, who mean nothing, and your wedding will be a 
sacrament of confectionery. Then what a household 
there will be ! Real sorrows will come into it, and of 
what comfort will your showy accomplishments be then ? 
And do you expect to train up children on silks, and 
rings, and fashions, and porcelain, and negro minstrelsy ? 
Nothing comes of nothing; — it is a law of Almighty 
God. " Vanity of vanities," should be engraved over 
the portal of such a home. 

Here are some also seeking for a noble intellectual 
culture. They array them in such garments as custom 
demands of them, have spare time and money for their 
mind. Where ideas are spoken there are these young 
women found. A little money purchases a few good 
books, and these ships of thought unlade their wealthy 
freight at the poor girl's door. Daughters of rich men 
also have I known, not a few, some of them gifted with 
God's sweet benediction of beauty, seeking noble cul- 
ture of the mind, in art, letters, science, — power to 
think, to understand, to create. I see the future of 
these young women. Their character is something I 
am sure of. I know that granite is hard, and will last. 



EDUCATION. 231 

I know that these characters, so delicate, will stand all 
manner of fire, which granite cannot. Each one of these 
will be a candle in some happy home, where one by one 
a thousand little torches will get lit, to scatter light 
through the darkness, each one a lamp of beauty and 
blessedness. Real sorrow will come also to the homes 
of these women, when young, and when no longer young. 
It will shake the door and come in, but wisdom sanctifies 
the sorrow, and the angel of destruction lays a blessing 
where he took a friend, and the house is filled with the 
odor of ointment coming from the alabaster box which 
the angel brought and broke. 

The value of intellectual culture, — nobody knows it 
all. How it affects a man's religious growth. What 
an odds between the religion of the man who thinks 
and knows, and that of one who merely accepts folly 
traditionally handed down. What a difference between 
the minister who never thinks, but only prattles and 
gossips, or at the very utmost only quotes, with no 
aboriginal piety and wisdom, and the minister who 
reaches his own right arm into God's heaven, and gets 
inspiration for himself, and then preaches a natural re- 
ligion based on the facts of every man's consciousness, 
on the constitution of the universe and the higher law 
of God. The ignorant minister, hawking at geology and 
schism, preaches superstition in the name of God, and 
Atheism springs up in his furrows, and shouts behind 
him, — " No higher law ! " " Down with Jesus ! Away 
with him ! Not this man but Barabbas ! " But the wise 
minister goes forth, carrying precious seed. He shall 
come also, bringing his sheaves with him. Thousands 
of generations shall rejoice in his life, long after the 
tombstone shall have crumbled into dust on his forgotten 
grave. You cannot be a fool without cursing mankind ; 



232 EDUCATION. 

you cannot be wise without blessing them. Every par- 
ticle of wisdom you gain for yourself is given to the 
whole world. " Thou shalt serve the Lord with all thy 
mind ! " — what a great command it was. And is it not 
your duty and mine, ay, is it not our privilege, to cul- 
tivate the gift God has given us, and enlarge it into 
glorious beauty, and then have the crown and the satis- 
faction which shall come from true wisdom in this life 
and the life to come ? 

Riches have their service. I have nothing to say 
against them, very much in their commendation. But 
who is there that would not have inherited wisdom from 
his father, rather than all the gold of California ? Is 
there a mother or father who would not rather leave 
wisdom to their children than all riches ? Few men 
can leave a great estate of gold ; every man can leave 
an estate of wisdom if he will. 



I value the education of the intellect not for its pres- 
ent joy alone, but for the greater growth it gives, the 
enlargement of the cup to take in more and higher joys. 



BOOKS. 

I fear we do not know what a power of immediate 
pleasure and permanent profit is to be had in a good 
book. The books which help you most are those which 
make you think the most. The hardest way of learning 
is by easy reading ; every man that tries it finds it so. 
But a great book that comes from a great thinker, — 
it is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth, with 
beauty too. It sails the ocean, driven by the winds of 



EDUCATION. 233 

heaven, breaking the level sea of life into beauty where 
it goes, leaving behind it a train of sparkling loveliness, 
widening as the ship goes on. And what treasures it 
brings to every land, scattering the seeds of truth, jus- 
tice, love, and piety, to bless the world in ages yet to 
come. 



The accomplished orator treads the stage, and holds 
in his hand the audience, hour after hour, descanting on 
the nation's fate, the nation's duty. Men look up and 
say how easy it is, that it is very wonderful, and how 
fortunate it is to be born with such a power. But 
behind every little point of accomplishment, there is 
a great beam of endeavor and toil that reaches back 
from the man's manhood to his earliest youth. 



THE POWER AND INFLUENCE OF IDEAS. 

Whatever a man consciously makes is always a 
thought before it is a thing. This is true of all things, 
from the point of a pin to the political institutions which 
join five and sixty millions of Russians into an empire. 
The pin is pointed with thought, and sticks in the invent- 
or's mind before it exists as a fastening in a baby's 
garment. The Russian Empire is only the thought of 
Peter the Great and his rather short-lived ten succes- 
sors, added to the thought of such as went before them. 
So far as the noble life of Jesus of Nazareth came out 
of his will, that is, so far as it was personal life, not 
mechanical but self-conscious, it was first a thought. 
The excellences of his righteousness were first only 
opinions, ideas, intentions. Thus a thing is the outside 
of a thought ; a thought is the inside of a thing. A 



234 EDUCATION. 

steam-engine is only a great opinion dressed in iron, 
and it ran in somebody's head before it could be set 
a-going on any railroad ; nay, the railroad itself is a 
thought, — the bars, the cross-ties, and the foundation. 

There are false ideas and true ones. A truth is an 
idea which represents things as they are, a falsehood is 
an idea which represents things as they are not. False- 
hood is of two forms. First there is unintentional 
falsehood, and when that is arrived at carefully, it is a 
mistake ; when it is jumped at capriciously, it is a whim. 
Then there is the intended falsehood, which is not a 
mistake, but a mistelling, a lie. While a man firmly 
holds to a false idea, thinking it true, he will naturally 
follow it out, and he is to be respected for his fidelity 
to his own conscience, even though his conviction be 
wrong. Not the truth of opinions, but the conscientious 
fidelity wherewith we arrive at, and keep, and apply the 
opinions, is the test of manly virtue. Truth or falsehood, 
however, must bear fruit after its kind, and a man's 
sincere belief in a falsehood, and his fidelity to his own 
consciousness, will never secure him from the bad con- 
sequences of a bad thought when it is made a thing. 
The Canada Indians, deceived by the hunters, fully 
believed that gunpowder was raised in the fields like 
wheat and caraway, and sowed it in their little gardens 
for seed ; but their sincerity of belief did not make it 
sprout and grow ; they waited a long time, but the gun- 
powder harvest never came. 

Now as a srood deal of a man's conduct, and so his 
character, depends on his will, and as ideas, true or false, 
are the patterns whereby the will shapes our time into 
life, and our generic human substance into specific per- 
sonal character, you see how important it is to have 
true ideas, which represent the facts of human nature, 



EDUCATION. 235 

human duty, and human destination, to start with. The 
chaisemaker, the tailor, the shoemaker ; each wants good 
material to work on, good tools to work with, and good 
patterns also to work by; else his manufacture is neither 
useful nor beautiful. Now we are all mechanics of life, 
whereof ideas are the patterns. In the conduct of life, it 
is not enough to feel right, to desire right ends ; we 
must think right, devise ideas which are the right means 
to right ends. A fig-tree looking on a fig-tree becometh 
fruitful, it is true ; but a naked savage looking on a 
sheep does not become clad in broadcloth. Men merely 
desiring an excellence of manhood do not attain to it. 
We must form an idea thereof, devise the means thereto, 
and copy it into life. 

In the conduct of rational and civilized men there are 
always three things, — first an emotion, next an idea, 
and ultimately an act. In the conduct of the lower 
animals there are two things, emotions and acts, no 
ideas. God is mind for the emmet and the bee ; it is 
his ideas, not theirs, which they copy, in wax or in dust. 
There is no public opinion in the ant-hill ; there is no 
opinion at all, only instinctive feeling and instinctive 
action. But man has the power to create the middle 
terms between his primitive emotion and his ultimate 
act. He can know beforehand how his work will look 
when it is done. So, under the general providence of 
God, man is mind to himself, and constructs the patterns 
whereby he fashions his conduct, his life, his character. 
God taketh thought for oxen, not they for themselves. 
Man must take thought for himself. The beavers at the 
Lake of the Woods last summer forecast no plans of the 
huts which they were making, with the walls uncom- 
monly thick, to provide against the hard winter. They 
did not know the hard winter was coming ; God knew 



236 EDUCATION. 

it, and thought for them, and daguerrotyped the fash- 
ion of their huts, which the beavers followed, ignorant, 
unconscious, 

" Glad hearts, without mistake or blot, 
Who do the work, yet know it not." 

But Michael Angelo at Eome, who at the end of the mid- 
dle ages was about to build St. Peter's Church, the great 
beavers' hut of all Christendom, before he drove a nail, 
or bought a stick of timber, had to work years long in 
setting the house up in his head ; yea, the form of every 
girder, the junction of every groin, where two arches 
meet, the shape of every brick, the form, size, and shape 
of all the scaffoldings, — : all these had their patterns in 
Michael's thought before they became tangible things. 
God gives man the power to construct the middle terms, 
ideas, the power to make the patterns which he will fol- 
low. When the in becomes out, the excellence or defect 
of the ideal will appear in the actual work. The wheel 
which ran awry in the head will not run true in the mill, 
whether the contrivance be a mill for grinding a man's 
coffee in the morning, or a contrivance for grouping one 
and thirty states into a great government. The wool 
grows on the back of the wild sheep at Thibet, while she 
takes no thought for raiment. The housekeeping of the 
sheep family, and the government of the sheep flock, is 
all provided for, whilst they take no thought for the mor- 
row. But God gives man the risky privilege of mana- 
ging these things to a great degree for himself. Hence 
while the beavers at the Lake of the Woods build just 
as their first ancestor, the protoplast and old Adam of 
beavers, built a hundred thousand years ago, while the 
wild sheep of Thibet is dressed just like the primitive 
ewe of the sheep kind, and manages her family in the 
same way, while the governor of the flock has known no 



EDUCATION. 237 

change, — man alters his house, his dress, his domestic 
economy, his government, and all things, 

" From seeming evil still educing good, 
And better thence again, and better still, 
In infinite progression." 

The change of ideas comes first. They are the seeds of 
actions and institutions in time to come. Our republican 
government, its virtues, its vices, our churches, our 
families, — they are the outside of ideas which our fath- 
ers set agoing, a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand 
years ago. To-day, what new ideas there are coming 
into life, — John the Baptists crying in the wilderness, 
forerunners of the Messiah, promising the kingdom of 
God ! Like the old forerunner, they are often said to 
have a devil, nay, to be devils, though some day whole 
Jerusalems will gird up their loins and go .out to meet 
them. 

Men do not see the power of an idea. " It is only an 
opinion, nothing but a thought," say we ; " let it alone ! " 
Wait till the opinion becomes the thought of a nation, 
till the idea is an act, as it will be, and then, who shall 
stand against it, when it presses forward like the tide of 
the Atlantic sea ? As you look carefully, every thing re- 
solves itself back into an idea ; the solid fixtures of the 
world, — how swiftly they return to their primitive form, 
and, as you look at them, melt away into a thought. A 
man builds his ship out of ideas, and by these sails over 
the sea, fronting the storm. Fulton's idea condensed all 
the two and thirty winds into the boiler of his boat. A 
single man at Washington, sitting at a topographical 
bureau, has by his thought shortened the average voyage 
from New York to the Equator twelve days, — for a 
thought is a short way of doing a long thing. A few 



238 EDUCATION. 

years ago the town of Lawrence was nothing bnt clay in 
the ground, timber in the woods, water in the Merrimack, 
and a thought in a Boston merchant's head. A mill is a 
private opinion made public in matter ; a republic an 
idea worked out into men. The faulty thought appears 
in the crazy wheels of the loom, which snaps the thread, 
or in the perverse institution of the state, which con- 
founds the welfare of men. Pope Gregory the Seventh 
has been dead almost eight hundred years, and at Avig- 
non or elsewhere his powerful dust has crumbled, dis- 
solved, and disappeared, with other dust ; but his dead 
hand, with a thought in it, still keeps every Catholic 
priest in the wide world from wedlock. The whim of 
some Oriental fanatic, who has been dead these three 
thousand years, grates the windows of half a million nuns 
in Christian Europe. The laws of nations are only 
thoughts, better or worse ; the theologies of the world 
are only opinions condensed. Judaism, Heathenism, 
Christianity, is each an idea. Monarchy, aristocracy, or 
democracy, is only a thought, carried into an act ; and 
as the thought, so the thing. Speculative opinions, are 
they ? So men say. Look again ! — the opinion is an 
institution, to bless or curse mankind. 

There is a wide difference in the power of men to de- 
vise ideas, false or true. Here is a woman who cannot 
lift the wicker cradle in which her puny baby cries ; 
here is a stout man who can hoist up six or seven hun- 
dred pounds weight, carry it a hundred yards or so, and 
set it down, his knees not smiting each other meanwhile. 
Now there is a greater difference between the specula- 
tive power of men than between that maternal butterfly 
and the burly truckman. One man can only carry a 
little bowl of thin, sour opinions, superstition and water, 
which some priestly monk mixed to confound and intoxi- 



EDUCATION. 239 

cate the world a thousand years ago. Here is another 
who can take on his head a whole world of ideas, gath- 
ered from the past, the present, and the future, received 
into his inspired brain from the great God, and he moves 
in consequence with such momentum that he goes 
through Church and State, and death cannot stop him, — 
but Moses, Confucius, Socrates, and Jesus run by their 
tombstones several thousand years, nor will they stop for 
some thousands of years to come ; and you and I catch 
hold of their wide-spread skirts, or are sucked in with 
the whirlwind of their sweeping rush, and so are our- 
selves carried forward through Church and State. There 
are great bad men whose large speculative power de- 
vises mistakes by accident, or lies by whim, — ideas which 
represent selfishness, injustice, hate, impiety, practical 
atheism. They sow the world with wickedness, they 
beget drunkards, they spawn tyrants, they are authors 
of wide-spread misery to mankind. Then there are great 
good men, whose ideas represent the natural benevolence 
of our humanity, justice, love, piety. What different re- 
sults come from the thought of a Jesus, or the thought 
of a Nero ! Knowledge is always power for good or ill, 
because it gives the man the ability to do things short. 
Now when a man of ideas is a good man, and uses his 
great power for a noble purpose, then he carries out the 
great idea of God ; when he is a bad man, then he is the 
greatest curse to the world. 

Now see the practical influence of ideas ; first of false 
ideas. Here is a young man who thinks the chief end 
of life is enjoyment, mere animal pleasure. That is his 
idea of life. He thinks there is no higher law of God, 
above the transient instinct for selfish, sensuous delight, 
no law of God above his private passion. See how his 
thought becomes a thing. Wine, horses, cards, dice, in- 



240 EDUCATION. 

decent romances, licentious pictures, women debauched 
and debauching, and men yet more debauched, and de- 
bauching yet worse, — these are his companions, the 
tools of his work. By and by there will be a character, 
selfish, mean, contemptible, and a loathly body, that dis- 
ease is fast tearing to pieces. That will be the publica- 
tion of his idea. On his tombstone you might write, 
" Here continueth to rot/' &c. 

Here is a man not young, who thinks this life is the 
time to get money, honor, social distinction, and no more ; 
to get them, no matter how. That is his idea. See what 
his life is, how it ends. Late in his existence, I shall 
not call it life, he has a warm house, a cold heart, a full 
purse, an empty soul, a deal of respect and honor ; but a 
character contemptible and almost worthless. He leaves 
a great estate in house and stocks, a great reputation in 
the newspapers and the meeting-house, and he takes 
into the kingdom of heaven a little, mean, dastardly, and 
sneaking soul, so small that it seems hardly worth taking 
across the grave and paying the toll on at Death's door. 
And so he passes away, leaving the fortune of a million- 
naire, and a character which a beggar would be ashamed 
to have dropped as a pittance into his alms-basket. The 
debauchee is only an idea in the flesh, the hunker is his 
own opinion published in his existence. 

Here is an idea that God made woman for man's con- 
venience, not a person, but a thing to serve a person, a 
pin for man to hang his garment on ; that she is infe- 
rior to man in the substance of her nature, in the pur- 
pose of her life. See what comes of it. The savage 
makes woman his slave ; the civilized man bars her from 
business, education, political rights. Out of that idea 
has come the enforced celibacy of Pagans and Christians, 
the enforced marriage of lust. The harems of King Sol- 



EDUCATION. 241 

omon, of Louis the Fifteenth, and of Brigham Young, are 
all founded on that thought. It sets the Circassian girls 
for sale in the market of Constantinople ; it puts English, 
French, and American girls for hire, worse than for sale, 
in the shambles of Paris, London and Boston. The idea 
was a thought in the dull head of the savage, in the dark 
mind of some Hebrew Jew three thousand years ago ; it 
is a fact in the saloons of Solomon, Mahomet, Louis the 
Fifteenth, and in the dens and cellars of Ann Street in 
Boston, or the Five Points of New York. You meet its 
results in the alms-house and the house of correction. 
Woman is the tool of man's selfishness, and he may do 
what he will with the staff which he carries in his hand ; 
— that is the thought. See in what ghastly letters it is 
writ in all the great cities of the world. 

Here is another idea, that men are not equal in the 
substance of human nature, and the rights consequent 
thereon ; but a man's substantive rights, ecclesiastical, 
political, social, domestic, individual, are proportioned to 
his accidental power, and so the strong may use the 
weak for his interest, and against theirs. It is nothing 
but a thought, — how harmless it seems ; but when it 
has become a thing, then what is it ? All the selfish aris- 
tocracies in the world have grown out of it. The mill- 
owners in Saxony, Silesia, and Belgium, oppress their 
poor and ignorant serfs. in factories, under this idea; in 
England it gives the land of sixteen million men to twen- 
ty-five thousand aristocrats; and in America it keeps 
three and a half million men in bondage, and fills the 
sails of all the slave-trading ships upon the ocean. It is 
only an idea, one end of it ; the other spreads out into 
all the oppression which there is in the wide world. 

Here is another thought yet ghastlier; — that God is 
an ugly God, mighty and wise, but not just and loving ; 

16 



242 EDUCATION. 

that he hates the sinner, and loves only a few mean big- 
ots who crouch down and debase their little souls in the 
dust 7 in the dear name of God. The function of religion 
is to appease the wrath of God, to intercede with him 
that he may spare some one of us. See what this idea 
comes to. In the individual man it comes to fear and 
trembling. He is afraid to think lest he offend God ; 
reason is carnal, belief spiritual ; thought is only human, 
faith is divine. So the man does not dare to be wise, 
lest he enrage his God * he does not dare trust his con- 
science, nor his affections, nor his own great, natural, re- 
ligious soul, lest God who made man and all these pow- 
ers should be angry because he used them as they were 
made. So superstition comes in the place of manly life, 
fear in the place of love, and the priest pinches a man's 
forehead from its native ampleness into nothing but the 
forehead of a beast. In the hands of the priest this idea 
is the horridest tool which any tyrant ever wrought out 
or wrought with. He paints his grim and devilish con- 
ception of God on the window of the mediaeval church, 
and the people cannot look up at the light but this horrid 
phantom stands there between them and the sun. It is 
only an idea, but it built the Inquisition, — Italian, Span- 
ish, East Indian, Mexican, South American; it hung 
Mary Dyer on Boston Common ; it burnt John Rogers 
at Smithfleld ; it has been the parent of persecution 
since the world begun. It is only a thought at first ; it 
spreads into misery, it ends in the notion of eternal tor- 
ment, it makes a hell on earth. Religion is the master 
element in man ; it is meant to rule. Ideas of religious 
matters are the most powerful ideas in the world; their 
influence is the widest in its spread, the deepest in its 
intensity ; and if they are false, then they work the most 



EDUCATION. 243 

hideous woe, and every other false thing stands behind 
them as its castle and fortress. 

But trua ideas are more powerful than false. The 
forces of the material world and the purposes of God are 
on their side ; eternity is their time of triumph. 

Here is a young man who has the idea that it is his 
duty to be a man, a whole man, true to all his nature, his 
body co-ordinate with his spirit, that mastered by its 
own higher powers. It is only a thought in that young- 
man's head, but what a life will come out of it. He will 
have the natural and legitimate delights of the body, joys 
that not only bless but refine and elevate. He will seek 
for such riches, such respect, power, station, honor, as he 
thinks he needs, will seek them by legitimate ways. He 
will get them, or fail thereof; and either way he will be 
a noble man; not living to eat and drink, but eating and 
drinking to live. His wealth will be a means of life, not 
life's end ; a help to character, not a substitute for it. Is 
he a servant, — he will be a man serving, faithful to 
every duty, writing out in his humblest, poorest work, 
the integrity of his own consciousness. Is he rich, able- 
minded, — he will use every faculty for its legitimate pur- 
pose, and by his culture, his office, his fortune, he will 
only lengthen out his native arm that he may work in a 
broader field and do more good. 

Out of this idea what beautiful lives come forth. It 
makes a good citizen, father, mother, husband, wife, sis- 
ter, aunt, friend. young man ! young woman ! there 
are few things I could wish you to inherit so fair as this 
to start with in life. If your mother gave you this, this 
only, count yourself well-born, ay, rich, and translate 
your mother's beatitude into your own conscious act. 



244 EDUCATION. 

That bud, — what a youth it will blossom into ! What a 
fruit it will mature into in the autumn of your life ! 

Here is another true idea, — that it is the function of 
the strong to help the weak. What a world of good will 
come of it ; nay, has alread}^ come ! The strong-minded 
man must be the teacher of the weak, the well-mannered 
set lessons to the ill-bred, the man of high station use 
his position for all the rest, and most of all for whoso 
needs it most. The strong classes must help the weak,j 
the rich aid the poor, not by charity so much as justice ; 
helping them to start as the thriving start, and to gain 
riches for themselves by honest industry, not by the pe- 
cuniary charity of another. The educated must help the 
ignorant, the self-respectful the abandoned, the civilized 
the savage, the religious those with no religion, not 
barely call them pagans, infidels, or atheists. The free 
must help the bound. 

That idea is older than Jesus of Nazareth, but it shows 
in his great life like fires at night ; and that large human 
glory which burns around his brow, so that we see him 
two thousand years off, came out of this thought, — " The 
Son of Man has come to save that which is lost." What 
a good work it does now ! In Catholic countries it 
builds hospitals, founds colleges, establishes sisterhoods 
of charity, sends missionaries all over the world. In 
Protestant lands it founds great, noble political and so- 
cial institutions not less, schools for the ignorant and the 
poor, asylums for the old, the orphan, the sick. In New 
England it offers the free school to everybody, and fur- 
nishes the alms-house, wherein men shall be protected 
against starvation, or perishing by cold ; it goes further, 
and teaches the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb 
to speak, the crazy to be calm, yea, the drunkard to be 
sober, the criminal to mend, and seeks to be mind even 



EDUCATION. 245 

to the fool. There are a few men who seek to be free- 
dom to the slave, spite of the Church, spite of the State. 
Look about you in the humane institutions of Massachu- 
setts and New England, from the free schools to the pri- 
vate charity that would snatch women from the worst 
fate that can befall them, and see the influence of an 
idea. I am proud of this nineteenth century. It is a 
great triumph of mankind. I love to think of the wealth 
it has created, the roads of earth, wood, stone, iron, 
which it has built, the ships, the shops, the mills, the 
thousand-fold machinery whereby we soothe and cheer 
and comfort the bodies of the world. But the fairest 
work of this nineteenth century is its philanthropy. I 
am far more proud of that. From the sixth to the six- 
teenth century, what was called the Christian Church 
built cathedrals and monasteries, — the thought of a half 
savage people done into stone, great prayers in marble, 
painted glass, and music. But the idea of justice now is 
getting incarnated into men, and I like best that archi- 
tecture which builds up living stones, quarried even in 
the street and the jail. I am thankful for the mediaeval 
temple of stone, but more thankful for the effort in our 
time to incarnate the thought of God, and make his word 
our flesh. 

Here is one idea more : God is infinite in power, wis- 
dom, justice, love, and holiness. Religion is the service 
of God by the normal use, development, and enjoyment 
of every limb of the body, every faculty of the spirit, 
every power we are born to or have acquired. That is 
the greatest idea which tenants any mortal mind. Alas, 
it is only a thought as yet ! As yet there is no nation, 
no sect, no community, no single church even, that 
has taken the idea, and sought to make the thought 
a thing. One day it will be the thought of a church, 



246 EDUCATION. 

then of a circle of elm relies, then of a nation, at last of 
mankind, — and, oh, what a world is to blossom out of 
this great thought ! 

How poor it seems to get good patterns for shoes, for 
coats, desks, carpets, houses, railroads, ships, and yet not 
have good ideas for noble human life, — to have a bonnet 
which represents more artistic ideas in the milliner than 
human ideas in the wearer. It is a little mortifying to 
think how many good mechanics, merchants, lawyers, 
doctors, there are, how few good men. But that is not 
first which is spiritual; after the bud the blossom, after 
the blossom the fruit. All this mere material work is to 
serve as basis, whereon mankind is to build up charac- 
ter. Noble things are the John the Baptists which run 
before great Messianic thoughts which you and I are to 
build into some kingdom of God here on earth. A great 
idea will become a great many things. A true one will 
become beautiful institutions, noble women, and noble 
men. One great truth Jesus of Nazareth broke into 
eight fair beatitudes, that smaller men might the better 
carry it. What wonders they have wrought, and are 
working still. What great ideas are now starting in the 
world! Great truths — nothing can stop them; they 
have the momentum of the universe, for the Infinite God 
is behind them and pushes them on ! Think you that 
armies of soldiers, congresses of politicians, crowds of 
debauchees, of hunkers, practical atheists, can ever stop 
a single thought of God? Hold up your hand against 
the lightning, and stop a thunderbolt ! you shall do it 
sooner than that. Not a truth can perish. As I think 
of the great ideas now stirring amongst men, I feel as in 
a florist's shop when I look on buds, scions, and seeds 
that are designed for the gardens and farms of men. I 
look forward a few years, — there are blossoms, there is 



EDUCATION. 247 

fruit, abundance, come out of these. So out of this great 
idea that God is Infinite Power, Wisdom, Justice, Love, 
and Holiness, that human religion is the service of Him 
by the normal use, development, and enjoyment of every 
limb of this consecrated body, with every faculty of this 
enchanting spirit, with every power we have earned 
or inherited, — I see what men, what families, what 
churches, what towns, states, nations, and what a world 
shall in due time come. Ay, truth is strongest, and pre- 
vails over all ! 



THE USE OF BEAUTY. 



The spectacle of loveliness over our head, and under 
our feet, and all around us in the world, is of more use- 
fulness to us than we know. I never knew a farmer, 
however rough, who did not take delight in the beauty 
of his waving field of wheat, apart from its use, who did 
not see loveliness in the Indian corn, from the first mo- 
ment its tender spike broke through the sod, to the last 
moment when its yellow ear hung over and down, natu- 
rally protected against the inclemency of winter. The 
clown of the country rejoices in his father's oxen and 
sheep. We do not see the use of this at first ; but when 
the farmer's boy lies awake of autumn nights, to hear 
the ripe apple plump to the ground through the moon- 
light, when the farmer's daughter wakes before dawn to 
listen to the song of earliest birds, and see the clear 
glitter of the morning star, and in those things finds a 
compensation for many a hardship and sorrow, and gets 
an impulse to sustain her life amid the toil of the dairy 
and kitchen, — then you see the high use of this material 
beauty wherewith G-od environs us round, in the heav- 



248 EDUCATION. 

ens over our head, and in the earth under our feet. 
When the Scotch peasant at his work learns such a lesson 
from the little daisy which he turns up with his plough- 
share, — " Wee, modest flower," — you see that God was 
not asleep when he created all this beauty and put it 
round us ; for the farmer's daughter, and son, and Burns 
the poet, only tell what thousands know, but cannot 
speak, and what millions feel, but do not know, and still 
less can speak. 



THE ELEVATING INFLUENCE OF BEAUTY. 

As the world of art comes out of man's love of ma- 
terial beauty, so the world of science comes from man's 
delight in the ideal intellectual beauty of related things ; 
and then the worlds of art and science, — how much 
they do to elevate man from the gross material condition 
into which this savage child was born. It is for this 
purpose that God sows the world with dew-drops in 
May and June, and spangles heaven all over with stars 
that burn forever in their immortal beauty. The use of 
things causes man first to fear, and drives him. Then 
beauty charms his eye to love, delight, and trust. As 
fathers and mothers please their children with picture- 
books, and teach the A B C on blocks of yellow wood, to 
fix the baby eye, and as these children find wisdom 
whilst looking only for delight, so the dear Father leads 
all his human family upwards and on, delighting us with 
the shape of an apple, the color of a rose, or the mystery 
of a star, or the romance of the new moon, till we learn 
art and science both, and we learn the commandments 
while we are looking at the pictures in this great primer 
of the Lord. 



EDUCATION. 249 

MORAL EDUCATION. 

How many a thief might have been an honest me- 
chanic, doctor, lawyer, minister, had some honest man 
taken a little charge of him in his boyhood ; how many 
a girl, predestined by her circumstances to the vilest 
degradation, would have been saved by a kindly word 
and the putting into a good wholesome family ! Already 
we begin to take steps that way. Adult schools in our 
great cities are the most beautiful pieces of Christianity 
that I have yet seen in what is called a Christian world. 
There is no charity like education. It must, however, 
be moral as well as intellectual. 



SELF-IGNORANCE. 



It often happens that men are not very well ac- 
quainted with the best things in them, they see them so 
seldom. We live with our human nature as the Mexi- 
cans lived in California, not knowing the unsummed 
gold which slept unseen, waiting to be brought to light. 
A young fellow whom I knew, once did a brave thing, 
which brought in its train a deal of self-denial. He did 
not mean to do it ; it did itself, and he was astonished. 
" How came I to do such a thing ? " quoth he to himself, 
when he got home and sat down alone w T ith his God and 
the darkness. And so he looked to see whence came 
that rath flower, unexpectedly springing up in its fra- 
grant beauty, and he found there was a whole bank 
of just such violets, which he had not known before, 
enough to sweeten all the winds of heaven. It is so with 
us all. So old stories tell that Grecian Narcissus went 
about with rude swains in Attica, and thought himself 



250 EDUCATION. 

but one of them, — ill-mannered and boisterous, and not 
treating well the swine which he fed, — till one day by 
accident he saw in the water a face as beautiful as 
Aphrodite and Phoebus Apollo both united, and was 
astonished to find it was his own, and that he too be- 
longed to the handsome kindred of the gods. From that 
day forth Narcissus went another man, and drove his 
swine a-field as if he were himself a god, scorning all 
unhandsome and all ungodly conduct. Thus it is with 
all men, not knowing what manner of spirit we are of, 
till accident, or some great man, or some great event, 
lets us into our own secret, and we are introduced to 
ourselves. 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 



THE COMPLETE ORGANIZATION OF SOCIETY. 

THE Indian went poor and cold. There was the 
Merrimack clapping its hands and saying, "I will 
spin for you as soon as you are ready to have me." 
And when men were wise enough to organize its pow- 
ers, it commenced spinning and weaving for them j and 
when we are wise enough to organize men as well as 
we now organize matter, then the Napoleons and Caesars, 
the great rivers of humanity, will not be forever over- 
flowing their banks, raging and tearing and committing 
destruction, but spinning and weaving for us after their 
great sort, — a harness by which you and I can work 
together and achieve a great good, the man of genius 
for himself and society, and society for itself and the 
man of genius at the same time. The greatest thing 
which any man can ask of God is an opportunity to use 
the gift he has. A complete organization of society 
would give every man an opportunity to use his gift. 



Work is the only universal currency which God ac- 
cepts. A nation's welfare will depend on its ability to 
master the world, that on its power of work, that on its 
power of thought. The wealth of New England runs 



out of the schoolhouses of New England. 



251 



252 HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

THE IDEA OF A EEAL CHUECH. 

The aim of a real Church must be, first, to promote 
the sentiment of religion, — religion as an instinctive 
feeling of dependence upon God, obligation, trust in 
God, love of God ; a sense of ultimate dependence on 
his providence, of unavoidable obligation to keep his law 
of nature, of absolute trust in the infinite fatherly and 
motherly providence of God, and of complete and perfect 
love of him which shall cast out every fear for the pres- 
ent and the future. It is also to promote the idea of re- 
ligion, to develop it as a conscious thought, so that what 
at first is a fact of mere instinct shall presently become 
an ideal of self-consciousness ; and that man shall be 
self-conscious of this unavoidable dependence, this obli- 
gation, this absolute trust, and this complete and perfect 
love. It is likewise to promote the application of this 
form of religion, with this sentiment and this idea, to 
life, and all departments thereof, the personal, the do- 
mestic, the social, the national, and the universal human 
form of life. 

That, I take it, is the end for which a church is to be 
organized ; a church, I mean, which believes in the infi- 
nite perfection of God. It is to accomplish this to the 
extent of its power, to desire to do it universally, — that 
is, for every man, and perfectly for each man. It is to 
help every man in the world to the attainment of this 
form of religious development and religious delight, aim- 
ing to do it for all who are within its reach, being limited 
only by its power. That is the end for which the church 
of absolute religion is to strive. It is not to attempt to 
change the will of God, not to affect God towards man, 
but to affect man towards God. 

The means to this end are very simple ; to get men of 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 253 

great religious genius, talent, or experience, and set them 
to teach that part of religion which they know, either 
by the intuition of their genius, by the toil of their re- 
flection, or by the discipline -of their life, and so give 
others opportunity to listen. When there is such teach- 
ing as that, there will always be listening enough. 
When the father sends his son to have his corn ground, 
it is not necessary to tell the boy to gather the lilies out 
of the pond ; he will do that of his own accord. Rivers 
of hearers always run down into the ocean of Paul's and 
Jesus's piet}^. It was so on Mount Tabor, and it is so 
in London, Paris, Vienna, everywhere that an earnest 
man lifts up an earnest and manly voice. 

Then for the concrete application of these ideas to 
life, a very simple organization is easily made ; now to 
spread the ideas, now to reform an evil, then to dispense 
charity, and the like. In God's world there is always 
enough for each, too much of nought. Scattered about 
in society there are always men of religious genius, with 
a telescopic heart for religious sentiments, a telescopic 
mind for religious ideas, in advance of mankind. These 
are the natural teachers, who preach with authority, not 
as scribes and Pharisees, appealing to another authority. 
The church is their place, the pulpit their joy and throne. 
These men of genius for religion there are. Then there 
are men 'of large talent for religion, and others with 
large experience of the discipline of life. These will be 
special teachers of religion, one having a special talent 
for one thing, and another for another. A particular 
church is fortunate if it can get an eminent man of 
religion for its teacher, a man of genius, great character, 
great conduct, great life. It is like getting a great lake 
to flow through a thousand pipes, into the streets and 
lanes of a great city, the mountain water bubbling up 



254 HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LTFE. 

in the haunts of filth and disease. Of what inestimable 
value is a man who can light the fire of piety in a thou- 
sand or a million hearts, and set each one of these as a 
candle lit in the dark to shine all about him. You see 
what relation such a man bears to the business, politics, 
science, literature, morals, and manners of his age. He 
will act as a critic, to judge others by his idea ; as a 
creator, to make better politics, juster business, to apply 
humanity to the perishing classes of men, to apply piety 
to the science, letters, morals, and manners of his age. 
If it be possible, such a man ought to be of the foremost 
intellect. It is a disgrace to our times that while strong 
men, of large ability, go in whole troops to the bar, the 
senate, and the market, it is chiefly little men who sneak 
into the pulpit, and put on the lion's skin of a prophet, 
with nothing to say, where presently there is no one to 
listen. You see the effect of this all over the land. 
The religious teacher ought to be a man of foremost 
intellect and culture, as well as piety ; but foremost as 
he may be, he must go back and look after the very 
hindmost of men, after the pauper, the idiot, the drunk- 
ard, and the felon, after men whose iniquity pauperizes 
the world, and makes felons of men. Amid artificial 
distinctions, he is to know no man as rich or poor, high 
or low, saint or sinner ; he is to cheer the penitent, to 
seek and save that which is lost. This is the highest 
function of the highest man, — to take the inspiration 
which he gets from God, and scatter it broadcast over 
the world, and out of his own great bosom to feed the 
hungry masses of men. The greatest praise of a church 
of this character would be that it gathered together the 
outcast, the hated and hunted, that it was the church 
where publicans and harlots found the doors wide open, 
and religion flowing in a great stream to them ; not the 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 255 

church merely of decorous and orderly men ; for the 
Church in our time, like Christ in his day, is come not 
to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, and to 
strengthen the righteous. 

I know, my friends, this is a very unusual idea of the 
work of a church, the requisitions of a minister, or the 
functions of his office. Some men say he must never 
meddle with business, or the state, or the perishing- 
classes, must never expose a great social wrong. Well, 
if a man is to appease the wrath of God, — who is never 
angry, — if he is to communicate salvation by a ma- 
chine, if he is to explain a book merely, then I admit he 
has nothing to do with the state, which may go on in 
its wickedness ; nothing to do with business, which may 
tread the poor to the ground; nothing to do with sci- 
ence, letters, morals, or manners. But if God be the 
Infinite God, if your heart and mine thirst for religion, 
then, if the minister is to promote religion, he is to 
meddle with the state, business, the perishing classes, 
literature, science, morals, manners, every thing that 
affects the welfare of mankind. 



THE IDEAL AND THE ACTUAL CHURCH. 

You know the idea of a church, which is a beautiful 
one. It is that of a body of men and women meeting 
together, with a common reverence for that Great Soul 
that overlooks the world, with a desire to promote their 
progress in religion. They choose the ablest man they 
can find to help them in their work, a man of large edu- 
cation, able in conscience, and powerful in soul. They 
say to him, " Come, we will give you your daily bread, 
and you shall break the bread of life for us. You shall 



256 HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

warn us of our sins, encourage us in our virtues, shall 
stimulate our mind with truth, our conscience with 
right, our heart with love, and our soul with faith in 
Gocl. Your right hand shall grasp the heavens, and 
bring down electric fire ; you shall dash the thunder- 
clouds to pieces, and give us the early and the latter 
rain, to quicken every herb and flower at our feet." 

What a beautiful thought is such a church, with such 
a minister, a real live minister serving a live church, 
bringing out of his treasury the old things of human 
experience and the new things of human nature, and so 
putting his prayer and inspiration into the public life ; 
and the people encouraging him in every word he utters. 
Think of Boston with four or five score of such churches 
as that, and eighty or a hundred such ministers. That 
would be a sign of Christianity not to be spoken against. 
And what a work would they do against the great sins 
of this place, — laying their hands on pauperism, and 
stopping that ; putting down crime, and abating misery; 
turning up their concave mirror towards God to receive 
new inspiration from him, and holding up their lenses 
to every quarter of the world to gather new fires from 
heaven and old fires from earth. Eighty or a hundred 
such churches in Boston would make us a city of saints 
in ten years. 

But look at the fact of the four or five score of churches 
here. Among their ministers are good and excellent 
men, whom I love and honor. I am not speaking of them 
individually. There is no complaint made against them 
in general ; they fit their position exactly. But see what 
they aim at. As a body, did they ever oppose an evil 
or a falsehood that was popular, or support a truth that 
was unpopular ? In this great city there are hundreds 
of anvils ringing with active industry; the churches 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 257 

are the only places that sleep. Compare a bank or an 
insurance office with a church ; one is all alive with 
enterprise, the other is nothing. Compare a business 
man with a minister, a superintendent of a railroad or a 
factory with the superintendent of a church, and see 
the difference. Just now the railroads have sent out a 
powerful engineer to learn some new way to tunnel the 
Alps ; they wish to have lrim bring back a new method 
of hewing rocks and cutting away mountains. It is 
proper that this should be done. But who ever heard 
of a church's sending out a competent man to inquire 
of some new body of men who had discovered a way of 
tunnelling through sin, and cutting down the great 
mountains of iniquity ? We have able men in- all other 
professions, of large talents, of industry which rises 
early and retires late ; we have a vast amount of ac- 
tivity which works all day long ; no country was ever 
richer in ability than the spot on which we stand. But 
where are the great ministers of Boston ? There is tal- 
ent enough all over the land ; you may hear the foot-fall 
of genius in your streets any day ; but it wears not the 
steps of the pulpit. Why not ? Because we do not 
want it to preach to us ; it might " hurt our feelings." 
You see in the minister a. smooth man, with the faculty 
of words, not with the faculty of things, who glides 
smoothly over the surface, never scratching through the 
varnish of the world ; a man of low mind and conscience 
and soul, of no ambition to serve the world with won- 
drous truth and beauty and piety, even though he creep 
on his knees to earn his daily bread. Why is it so? It 
is because the people love to have it so. It is not the 
prophet Isaiah, nor Paul, nor Christ, that we wish to 
have our minister ; but it is a priest. " Do as other men 
do," — that is our Sermon on the Mount. " Look out for 

17 



258 HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

your dollars and your respectability/' — these are the 
beatitudes which are preached to-day. Do you think 
we want to have other churches and different ministers 
here ? These answer the end they were designed to 
serve. Like people, like priest. I state the truth that 
our ministers are little men ; but think not that I blame 
them. I only mention the fact as one sign of the place 
and rank which Christianity holds in this town. 

Suppose a great man should come to Boston, with the 
pure, absolute religion in his heart, as it came from the 
nature of God. Suppose he should preach it with elo- 
quence that transcended all we know of old inspiration. 
Suppose he was a learned man, full of the storied history 
of the past, its curious literature, its hard-won experience. 
Suppose him rich in science, keeping even pace with the 
advance of men, so that he swept the whole ocean of hu- 
man thought, and gathered the gems of every land. Let 
him have prudence to foresee, as well as power to re- 
member ; let him be as wise as learned ; let him have a 
fir-reaching genius, which at a single stride goes whole 
ages before mankind. Let him be a million-minded man, 
endowed with reason, understanding, and imagination 
which can gather poetry from every star in heaven and 
every little flower that springs up by the wayside. Let 
him stand so tall as to catch the first gleam of truth far 
below the horizon, and reflect it down to you and me, 
and to the humblest mortal. Let him preach this reli- 
gion, blasting every sin with lightning, feeding our 
righteousness with sunshine, falling like God's sun and 
rain on the evil and on the good. Let him apply his re- 
ligion, giving his truth to our mind, justice to our con- 
science, love to our heart, and faith to our soul ; telling 
us what is wrong in our daily life and our theology, and 
in place thereof importing directly from God the univer- 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 259 

sal right, the true and good, to bless mankind. Let him 
do all this with the power of a thousand men, and love 
equal to the affection of a million men. Let him be a 
good man ; let him crumble up all his substance to feed 
the poor. Let him have charity and hope and faith even 
beyond the apostles, and let him bring it all to work and 
wake religion in our hearts, and aim to establish it 
among mankind. Suppose such a man should come, — 
should we give him a welcome ? Should we ask him to 
our pulpits ? No. Should we suffer him to be ? We 
should tell him his learning was folly, his genius mad- 
ness, his love a cheat, his inspiration insanity, his reason 
fanaticism, and his love of God infidelity. We should 
say of him, as they said of the old prophet, " He is clean 
contrary to our ways, and we will have none of him." A 
few good men would gather about him, and welcome 
him, and say to him, " Prophet, sow the seed of God in 
our hearts ! It is poor soil, but possibly a corn or two 
may come up and take root, and keep alive the seed of 
godliness on the earth." They would shelter him with 
their bare bosoms if need were ; but the rest of us would 
only hate him, as the Jews hated the Christ whom they 
cast off. 



NEW INSTITUTIONS REQUIRE NEW SOIL. 

All experience shows how difficult it is to build up 
new institutions on the ruins of old institutions in the 
same country. Christianity came very early to Rome, 
but it has always been vitiated by the old Paganism that 
is there. The Christians very early at Rome became 
the intensest bigots. They were forced into bigotry 
by the Paganism around them ; but even their bigotry 



260 HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

could not weed Paganism out of their ranks. Christian- 
ity is the democracy of religion ; but at first it could not 
organize its democratic idea amongst the ancient people, 
because the old aristocratic forms of religion pre-occu- 
pie4 the ground. The old crop had so injured the soil 
that it would not take kindly to the new seed that got 
sown there. Christianity therefore thrived much better 
amongst the new nations of the North than amongst the 
old nations of the South, simply because it did not find 
the ground pre-occupied by religious institutions and 
mythology. Protestantism is the democracy of Chris- 
tianity ; but Protestantism could not be carried out 
in countries that had long been stained by Catholicism. 
Accordingly it has never borne its legitimate fruits on 
the continent of Europe, nor even in England. 

This same difficulty appears in the political develop- 
ment of mankind. The great ideas of America are not 
wholly our own ; they were born the other side of the 
sea, they existed as sentiments hundreds of years ago, 
and as ideas a hundred years ago ; but the old institu- 
tions lay there in the way, and hindered these new ideas 
from becoming facts. After the old crop was out of the 
ground, the old stubble still choked the rising corn. See 
how difficult it is to establish a republic in France ; not 
from lack of ideas, nor of men who welcome the ideas, 
but on account of the old institutions ; the stumps of old 
theocracy, monarchy, aristocracy, are still in the ground, 
and it is hard work to get them out. This rule goes far. 
The old civilization has perished from Egypt, Asia 
Minor, India, Greece, Assyria. Italy, but no new civil- 
ization has come to take its place. These countries are 
still in the hands of the despot. Clear off the despots, 
making the soil clean of these old stumps, and it would 
take very kindly to the new seed. This will not always 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 261 

be so. The same thing takes place in agriculture. The 
savage crops his ground till he has exhausted it and it 
will grow no more corn, and then he turns to a new soil ; 
but the scientific farmer brings new crops out of the 
same soil. Nations do the same. I doubt not that man- 
kind will one day reclaim Egypt, India, Greece and 
Italy, for a new development in arts and freedom. Man- 
kind has not learned how to do it yet. Accordingly it 
was a great advantage to mankind that there was a new 
and virgin continent, w T hich God had hid away off here in 
the Western Ocean, where the ideas of Christianity, 
Protestantism, and Democracy might come. Our fath- 
ers took these ideas in their hands and sought to set 
them up in England. Driven thence, they sought to 
erect them in Holland. But the king and priest turned 
our fathers out of doors, and they fled here. It seemed 
a hard fate, but it was the best thing for them, for their 
ideas, and for mankind ; for had they attempted to found 
such a natiou in Europe, it seems to me they could not 
have accomplished in a thousand years what they have 
now done in two hundrecf and fifty. 



MAN PROPOSES, AND GOD DISPOSES. 

The institutions which tend to make us rich, intelli- 
gent, and free, are circumstances created by man. The 
machinery wherewith we make carpets at Lowell, and 
woollens and muslins at Manchester, turned by the brute 
forces of material nature, is the work of men. The ma- 
chinery of institutions which help make the character 
of New-Englanders, machinery turned by the spiritual 
forces of human nature, is just as much the work of men 
as the other. What we call Christianity is a human 



262 HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

scheme of religion, a republic is a human scheme of gov- 
ernment, both machines constructed by human thought. 
Two hundred years ago the institutions of New England, 
church, state, society, commerce, and the like, tended to 
make rough, strong men and women, able-bodied farmers, 
mechanics, soldiers, hunters, Indian-killers. The cir- 
cumstances of New England at this day tend to produce 
a very different form of humanity. In two hundred 
years we have altered the machinery, made the mill turn 
out a very different and superior form of work. It is 
true that two hundred years ago no man said, " Go to, 
now ! Let us devise us institutions which will produce 
such men and women." They trapped for other game, 
and found in their net prizes they looked not for. Fight- 
ing Indians and Frenchmen, New England did not think 
she was getting rid of the English king and nobility. 
Putting up saw-mills on Charles River and iron-mills at 
Saugus, holding town-meetings, this good old mother that 
bore us all did not know she was educating her children. 
She was filling her mouth, building her houses, she did 
not know what else. When with marsh hay she thatched 
the first schoolhouse in New Plymouth, she did not see 
that the Patent Office at Washington would one day 
come, as only a small wing thereunto. Man proposes, 
and God disposes a great many things which man never 
thought of. Old patriarch Jesse, remembering his sons 
in battle, sent stripling David with bread and cheese to 
his brothers; but when he got there, David slew the 
giant and became Israel's king. So goes the world. 
Man proposes a saw-mill, and God disposes it into a col- 
lege. 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 263 

NATIONAL PROGRESS. 

It is a good thing for a nation to be born into human 
history, to do its work, and then cease to cumber the 
ground. Most men seem to pray that America may be 
perpetual, that the Union and Constitution may last for- 
ever. I hope not. Surely there are better things in 
store than this " Universal Yankee," and better States 
than this " Model Republic," with its worship of money 
and its sacrifice of men. All the good things we have 
shall be preserved, the evil perish, and the nation with 
it. Mankind will one day bury the American State as 
gladly as the Babylonian, or Egyptian, or Roman, was 
gathered to its fathers. This nation shall also do its 
work, and pass away ; and future discoverers will dig in 
the ruins of Boston, as antiquaries explore the Indian re- 
mains of the West ; and they will come upon some rem- 
nant of our civilization, and they will say,. " These peo- 
ple were not wholly savage." Better institutions, bet- 
ter forms of religion, will appear, and better men will 
tread the ground over our heads. They will have gath- 
ered up every good thing that we brought to light, and 
put it in the golden urn of history, to be kept forever. 



The union of men in large masses is indispensable to 
the development and rapid growth of the higher facul- 
ties of man. Cities have always been the fire-places of 
civilization, whence light and heat radiate out into the 
dark cold world. 



264 HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF A NATION. 

The highest function of a nation is to bring forth and 
bring up noble men and women. High character, intel- 
lectual, moral, affectional, and religious, is the fairest 
fruit which grows on national institutions, and this is 
always the test question, " What manner of men and 
women does the nation bear and breed?" If they be 
mean and low, it is vain to boast of farms and mines, of 
mills and palaces, and riches high piled up. Nay, Democ- 
racy and Christianity are good for nothing, if they bear 
not men. A Newton, a Franklin, a Washington, a Socra- 
tes, a Jesus, a Luther, an Isaac Hopper, how much land 
or factory stock, how many million votes, would you set 
off against them ? Venice produced cold and material 
beauty ; she never nursed a saint in her bosom, nor bore 
a sage, nor orator, nor bard; while poor and ragged 
Scotland teems with poets, orators, philosophers, philan- 
thropists, noble men. 



HOW TO ESTIMATE THE VALUE OF A NATION. 

In estimating the value of a nation, you must not 
merely count the men, you must weigh them. You must 
not barely weigh the dollars, but gauge and measure 
and scan the quality of the men who own the dollars. 
An armful of Hebrews, a handful of old Greeks, have 
been of more value to the human race than all the four 
hundred millions of Chinese, with their Tartar and Malay 
progenitors. A single Moses, Socrates, or Jesus would 
weigh down whole provinces of the Celestial Empire. 



HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 265 

The constitutions which people value most are writ on 
the parchment of a drum-head, in the costliest of ink, 
which man carries in his heart, — and they are writ to 
the awful chime of cannon and the falling of towered 
towns. 



Chief Justice Blackstone said that woman was the 
favorite of English law. He should have said she was 
the favorite victim of English law. 



SUDDEN WEALTH IN A NATION NOT FAVORABLE TO PIETY. 

Covetousness is the great sin of America just now. 
The priest of mammon comes up with his " Thus saith 
the Lord ! " and the true God is bid to stand back. This 
was never so in New England before. New England for 
a long time was an exception in the world's history, and 
the class of men here who had the highest intellectual 
culture, and the largest wealth, and foremost social posi- 
tion, was the class in whom religion culminated and was 
preponderant. You could not have found another exam- 
ple of this in the whole globe of lands. Why was that ? 
Because New England was a religious colony, and men 
came here on account of their religious character ; came, 
as our fathers said, to sow the wilderness with good seed. 
The Puritan mother grimly took her austere baby in her 
religious arms, and fled over the waters, to bring up, in 
a log cabin, this little child to obey God, — come what 
might come to him, come what might come to men, — 
to obey God at all times. Now the Puritan blood is 
strong blood. It does not run out in one generation or 



266 HUMAN INSTITUTIONS AND NATIONAL LIFE. 

two ; it does not get much adulterated except after sev- 
eral generations. 

Now sudden prosperity and a great increase of wealth 
has come within fifty years, and it has brought the con- 
sequences which sudden wealth never failed to bring on 
a nation, state, or city. It has brought a decline of piety 
in the class of men foremost in social rank. The religion 
of New England is no longer an exception in the history 
of the world. I am not blaming any one, only stating 
the facts. 



THE POWEK AND ENDUEANCE 



OF 



WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 



T 



THE POWER OF THOUGHT. 

HE power of mind is amazing. How much we 
can do with thought. It is the universal solvent 
which reads all difficulties. All things which men make 
are thoughts first. Bows and arrows, the last gun, the 
last plough, were all thoughts before they were things, 
and hit the mark in some man's mind before they were 
let fly in the open air. The house, the ship, the bridge, 
the factory, were all thoughts ; when you come to the 
bottom thereof, you see they hang balanced between a 
man's mind and the earth's gravitation. So with the in- 
stitutions of England and America ; the common law, 
civil law, statute law, were all thoughts. The invisible 
mind of man is the great workshop of the human race ; 
there unseen hands construct the mills which grind for 
us peace, quiet, order. All civil mouths open at the 
miller's trough ; so all men revolve about the thinker. 
The fine lady whom I saw in the street the other day, 
carrying half an ass's load of finery, and such a weighty 
ballast of jewels, for so low and small a sail of wit, is yet 
the fine ore of those rough, able minds who have woven 
her up out of such manifold threads. Nay, the fop is 
equally beholden, and if little thought goes in his hat, 

267 



268 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

very much went to it. What a busy, bustling, noisy 
city is this Boston. It reminds the Biblical man of the 
net which hungry Simon Peter saw in his vision, wherein 
were four-footed beasts, wild beasts, and creeping things. 
But as you look it all over and through, you see that 
this city likewise is knit at the four corners, and the 
whole is let down out of the heaven of man's intellect, 
and it all resolves itself to thought again ; the great ma 
chinery, the wares in the windows of the shops, and all 
the other contrivances of use or beauty, are all trans- 
muted, and you see the stock they were woven out of, 
and the little shop of man's brain wherein they were 
fashioned up. 

A quiet man sits in his little room, and thinks down 
into the depths of human nature, and learns the constant 
modes of operation whereby men should keep the eter- 
nal laws of God ; and he thence constructs institutions 
which are to mould the destinies of millions of men not 
yet born. He is the most influential man in all the town. 
He makes no noise, thinking his silent work ; you do not 
hear his voice in the street, with the rumbling of loaded 
drays, the shouting of drivers trundling their costly mer- 
chandise, the noisy railroad trains which carry it thence 
across the continent. Perhaps nobody knows him, or 
sees that he is thinking. He is not a member of the 
Academy of Arts and Sciences, no Doctorate of Laws 
waits for him ; he is one of the forces of the universe, 
and it would be ridiculous to doctorate him. Great ships 
are unloading at the merchants' wharves, great wheels 
turn the manufacturers' mills with endless buzz, and the 
clock is never silent, while the thinker makes less noise 
than the carpenter putting up a shelf in the room hard 
by, or the girl bringing his cheap dinner home ; and he 
is yet doing a work which will last when merchants and 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 269 

ships, and manufacturers and mills, have all gone down 
the stream of time, and vanished into silence and per- 
ished utterly. Ships of thought noiselessly unlade their 
wares at his door, where the river of God, which is full 
of water, comes to turn also his silent mill, and there is 
no looker-on. 

How quietly this goes on. Did you ever see the vege- 
tative force, or hear the centrifugal forces of the earth, 
the moon, the sun, in virtue whereof we walk, or sit, or 
stand, or continue to be ? What a busy, bustling city 
was Athens, four hundred years before Christ ! What 
pride there was of rich men, and shouting of their slaves, 
what bawling of orators in the forum, what traffic in the 
markets and shops, what braying of donkeys, and noise 
in the fields ! Now all this is hushed and silent ; the 
rich men are forgotten, and the bawling of orators, the 
stir of the markets, and the braying of donkeys, long 
since ceased to be heard. But through the ages comes 
the voice of that one great thinker, Socrates, and sways 
the counsels of thoughtful men all round the world. So 
is it with Jesus of Nazareth. In Jerusalem were gath- 
erings of merchants from Alexandria and Damascus, 
Tarshish and Babylon ; the Roman pro-consuls there held 
their court, and Herod the Great was also there, with 
his dangerous power and untamed lust. What troops of 
priests and Levites were there, and the High Priest with 
his Urim and Thummim on his breast, the Ark of the 
Covenant behind the veil, and the seven golden candle- 
sticks were also there. But now it has all passed away, 
— the pomp of Herod's glory, the solemn grandeur of 
the High Priest ; nobody asks strength or might from 
the Urim and Thummim ; the Ark of the Covenant is 
gone ; the seven golden candlesticks have been carried 
to Rome and thrown into the Tiber, and no man knoweth 



270 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

where to seek for them ; the temples and walls of Jeru- 
salem have crumbled before the Roman power, and Rome 
herself has been driven to waste, and her gods are only 
the playthings of the poet. But the thought of a Naza- 
rene peasant has come down to us, an obscure young man 
riding on a donkey, attended by bare-footed peasants 
and humble fishermen, and has driven out from the old 
temples all that bought and sold and made merchandise 
therein, and now fills the wide green world with temples 
and priests. 

The free institutions of New England are only the 
thoughts of our fathers done into men, and our thoughts 
will one day be institutions if they are true and great, 
and you and I are greatly true thereunto. Said an old 
man to another, " We must put down that young thinker. 
He raises terrible questions." The truth was, the young 
thinker had got thoughts, and truths too, that the old 
man had not, and would not tolerate. Put him down ? 
It cannot be done ! There is not force enough in the 
human race to annihilate a single truth, though one man 
of the earth had it, and all the rest had it not. 



THE POWER OF TRUTH. 

The collective action of mankind is to proceed from 
the same motive, to obey the same moral law, aim at the 
same noble mark, and reach the same perfection, as the 
individual action of a single man. Mankind is but a great 
man. So a true idea must not only become private excel- 
lence in the corporeal, intellectual, moral, affectional, and 
religious character of a particular man or woman, but 
come out in the joy and gladness of whole millions of 
men. It will not only chase errors from my heart, but burn 



OP WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 271 

them up from the whole world of men ; for, as a spark 
of fire falling into dry grass in the North-west territory 
must needs burn and sweep over a wide reach of prairie, 
so a great truth, burning at first in a single soul, must 
ere long consume the false doctrines, from the family, 
community, nation, human race ; nay,, rather, as a true 
theological doctrine is creative more than destroying, 
like a single grain of corn it will come up, and grow, and 
bear fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, and so 
become the parent of other stalks and fields of corn, and 
in time it will sow the continent with its precious seed, 
and feed men by the million. So great truths about man, 
God, religion, burn for many a night in some humble 
mind, all obscure and unheeded, and of a Sunday in some 
lowly pulpit they get preached to a few shoemakers, to 
farming folk with their sweethearts and little ones and 
wives, sitting there in their pews ; and they will one 
day be a fire in the dry grass and thick old woods of 
theologic error, which shall crackle, and burn, and fall 
before the flame ; and next they will become corn for 
daily bread and for future seed ; and so at length shall 
they turn into happy life, widespread over many a green 
island of the sea, over broad continents, and become 
condensed into the focal civilization of great cities, full 
of men rich in material and spiritual worth. 



There never was a great truth but it got reverenced ; 
never a great institution, nor a great man, that did not, 
sooner or later, receive the reverence of mankind. 



272 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

ONLY TRUTH AND JUSTICE WILL SATISFY MAN. 

Now man is so made that nothing but truth will sat- 
isfy him. Interest may seem to demand a falsehood, but 
such is the nature of man, that, spite of interest, he will 
have truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. 
The self-will of popes and kings, of courts and crowds, 
may frighten me from the truth to-day • to-morrow I will 
turn to it, and confront the axe and the fagot ; nay, I will 
convert popes and kings and courts and crowds. Hu- 
man nature demands the true relation between man and. 
man, demands justice. Hence it makes laws, enacting 
to-day the justice that it sees, and nothing but justice 
will satisfy it. To-day personal selfishness triumphs, 
and men make a law which is unjust ; but to-morrow it 
must all be made over again. No passion, no purchased 
injustice, can prevail over the conscience of mankind ; 
that will gravitate towards the right, just as the waters 
from Mount Washington will run down on either side, 
and seek and find the sea. No judge, no supreme court, 
no army, can make injustice go down with mankind. 
Write it, enact it, get soldiers to execute it, get mean 
lawyers to enforce it, get hireling judges to declare it 
constitutional, get base priests to declare it is of God, — 
it is all in vain ! Slowly, silently, step by step, mankind 
advances, and advances, and advances, and puts its foot 
on the wicked thing, and treads it into dust. Only truth 
satisfies the mind at last, only justice the conscience. 
The human race is in perpetual convention to revise its 
constitutions, to amend its laws. History is a revolution 
of mankind, a turning over and over again. Therein 
conscience gets the victory over selfishness, justice 
comes nearer and nearer to conquest every day. Truth 
is never lost from man's science, nor a single grain of 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 273 

justice from human laws. No parliament, nor king, nor 
pope, nor president, nor convention, nor crowd, with 
" manifest destiny " to aid them, can ever make a lie or 
a wrong respectable in the eyes of mankind. It is hard 
for an empty bag to stand upright, or science without 
truth, or law without justice ; down they must. Let me 
be sure that a thing is true, — I know mankind's intel- 
lect shall welcome it. Convince me that a thing is 
right, — I know that slowly, inch by inch, mankind will 
march towards that right, form lines upon it, defend it 
with their life's blood. In man's love of truth and jus- 
tice, I see the grandeur and glory of human nature. 
I look, with profoundest gratitude to God, on this stead- 
fast progress of mankind in justice, and I look on it with 
amazement too ; for I also know the power of passion, 
the mighty force of self-interest. But there is a con- 
science in us which, like the attraction of sun and moon 
on the waters, sways the nations of men, and leads us 
forward in the path we have not trod, and which only 
God's eye hath seen. 



Justice is the key-note of the world, and all else is 
ever out of tune. 



INTEGRITY WINS. 



There is nothing which mankind respects so much as 
integrity ; we pay homage to every form of it. This 
quality in a man wins the esteem of his fellows more 
than wealth or eloquence, or brilliant talents, and in a 
woman attracts men more than elegance of dress or 
beauty of person. Beauty in woman is a well-written let- 
is 



274 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

ter of recommendation, introducing her to the world and 
bespeaking the kindly offices of every man. It is also 
the " cynosure of neighboring eyes/' and by its sidereal 
magnetism, draws all men unto it. But if it be attended 
with indolence and selfishness, if the bearer of this epis- 
tle in the flesh turn out a wicked mother, an evil wife, a 
false sweetheart, with what scorn do we look on the 
beautiful devil, whose shame cannot be hid, neither by 
the dress of Eve in Eden, nor that of many-skirted Em- 
press Eugenie in Paris. What homage do we pay to the 
womanly integrity of every aunt, sister, daughter, wife, 
or friend, never so ugly, who will do duty, though at the 
cost of great self-sacrifice ! 

Amongst public men, eloquence is what beauty is to 
a woman, or what riches are to a private citizen. What 
crowds will hang on the words of Mr. Fair-Speech ! 
They are swayed to and fro by the motions of his finger, 
quivering with unmeaning gesture, uplifted in the air. 
They are overloaded by the sounding words which ring 
from his lips. Mr. Items, the penny-a-liner, Mr. Hifalu- 
tin, the editor of the Spread Eagle and Know-Notliing 
Gazette, each declares the gods have come clown to us in 
the likeness of man, each brings his sheep and oxen to 
do sacrifice, and breaks down the English language with 
his stupid adulation. But by and by the mass of men 
find out that Mr. Pair-Speech is all talk, his eloquence 
foaming at the mouth. It is ascertained that the elo- 
quent lawyer pleads as well for the wrong as the right ; 
it is found out that the lecturer aims to please for his 
own sake, not, with manly generosity, to instruct for 
that of his hearers ; that the politician knows no " higher 
law " above the selfishness of his party or his own ambi- 
tion; that the Rev. Dr. Hot-and-Cold takes a " South- 
side " view of every wickedness, and for thirty pieces 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 275 

of silver would privately sell Jesus a second time, and 
publicly attribute to Iscariot every Christian virtue ; — 
and when men come to understand this, they look with 
contempt upon the mean creatures who prostitute their 
genius to earn the wages of iniquity, and turn off to 
some plain, honest, earnest man, — minister, lawyer, pol- 
itician, lecturer, — who only aims to tell the unheeded 
truth, and gives saving counsel to "do justly, love mercy, 
and walk humbly with God," and take what comes of it; 
and when he dies, though there are no " seventy mourn- 
ing coaches, and one hundred and forty sorrowful horses," 
and no flies of fashion and wealth to buzz about his dead 
face, yet of him it shall be said, as of the first Christian 
martyr, " Devout men carried Stephen to his burial, and 
made great lamentation over him." 



THE JOYS OF CONSCIENCE. 

Conscience brings delights which far surpass those of 
the intellect. No creation of literary or scientific gen- 
ius can give such joy as the organization of justice into 
human life, and the re-enactment of the laws of nature 
into the institutions of court and state and church. No 
doubt there is a proud delight in creating works of lit- 
erary or artistic genius, but what are they to the works 
of justice and humanity ? Leibnitz makes his Calculus 
of Infinitesimals, Newton constructs his Principia of the 
Heavens, Bacon devises his New Instrument of Thought, 
La Place describes in science the Mechanics of the sky, 
and Yon Humboldt groups all the knowledge of mankind 
into one great Cosmos of order and beauty. 

These are great works, attended with well-proportioned 
joy. But the Bacons who make new instruments for 



276 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

morals, the Leibnitzes who calculate the infinitesimals of 
conscience, the Newton s who determine the principia of 
ethics, and the La Places who organize the celestial me- 
chanics of human society, and show how men can live 
together peaceful and blessed, the Humboldts who shall 
condense the science of past times and present into one 
great human cosmos, where the strong and weak shall 
dwell happily together, — how much grander is their 
work, and how much more joy does it bring the man, and 
those who shall rejoice therein ! 



THE PREPONDERANCE OF GOODNESS IN THE WORLD OF MAN. 

As I look over a year of time, I am astonished at the 
amount of goodness which I have seen, more than I am 
at any thing besides. The evil lies atop, it is in sight of 
all men who open their eyes, while deeper down there is 
laid the solid goodness of mankind, which is not always 
visible, and never at a glance. 

What we name goodness is made up of four elements. 
The topmost and chiefly obvious thing is benevolence, 
general good willing, what we call kindness, a feeling of 
relationship toward all mankind, or toward those special 
members of the human family who stand nearest ,to us. 
This benevolence is colored into various complexions by 
the circumstances of the individual, and is turned to va- 
rious specialties of human action, directed now to one 
form of humanity, and then another, but it is always 
marked by good temper, good humor, or good nature. 

Benevolence being the most conspicuous element in 
goodness, we think it is all. But as you look a little 
deeper, you find the next most obvious element is sin- 
cerity. The benevolent man is what he seems. He 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 277 

does not wax himself over with a fair outside, to hide 
his mean substance by a surface show of splendid and 
costly qualities. His wood is solid ; it is not a plank of 
deal, veneered over with a thin coating of rosewood, 
but as he seems outside he is inside. His virtuous com- 
plexion is not painted on him, but runs through all his 
substance. 

Thirdly, there comes justice, that fairness which aims 
to give every man his due. But with our good man, it is 
commonly justice which is more anxious to do duty for 
others than to claim right for himself; more anxious to 
pay an obligation than to collect a debt. It is justice 
mixed with that sweet leaven of mercy which makes it 
a lighter but more attractive bread, a good deal different 
from that sour unleavened bread of justice merely. In 
those that we call good men, the affections are a little 
stronger than conscience ; so the good man's justice is 
sometimes not quite plumb, it bends a little, from his 
personal interest. But that is a failing which leans to 
virtue's side. The good man has more justice than other 
men, but designs to be a little more than just towards 
others, and is a little less than just to himself. Such a 
man is like those generous traders who always make a 
liberal scalage in selling, and then make some little de- 
duction also when they come to settle. His conscience 
makes him just, and his affections go further and make 
him generous also, for generosity is justice phis kindness. 

At the bottom of all there lies piety, — the universal 
love of the first good, first perfect, and first fair, the love 
of God, " who is of all Creator and defence." The good 
man may not be always conscious of this piety; there 
have been cases where such have called themselves 
atheists, that ugliest of all names. But, depend upon it, 
piety is always there at the bottom of all goodness ; for 



278 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

piet} 7 is not that merely technical and special thing which 
it is sometimes mistaken for, but it is that general stead- 
fastness and integrity, that faithfulness, which is to a 
man what perpendicularity is to a wall or a column, what 
solidarity and impenetrability are to matter in general. 
If a pyramid stands six thousand years, and never cracks 
in a single stone, you will be pretty sure that it rests on 
a good bottom, even if the pyramid does not know it, 
nor know what it stands on. 

If I were to express the proportions of goodness by 
figures, I would call the complete goodness ten; and 
piety would be four parts, justice two, sincerity one, 
and benevolence three. 

I suppose many of us are a little disappointed with 
mankind. The world of the girl's dream is not the world 
of the young woman's actual sight and touch, and still 
less is it so of the woman no longer young. In the 
moonlight of dreamy youth, as we look out of the win- 
dows, and rejoice in the blooming apple-trees, how differ- 
ent does the world seem from what we find it the next 
day, when, in the heat of a May sun, we go about and 
remove the caterpillars from the scrubby trees. A boy 
bred in a wealthy family in a little village, secluded 
from the eyes of men, filling his consciousness with na- 
ture and the reflection of human life which deep poems 
and this great magnificent Bible and other religious 
books mirror clown into his own soul, goes out into the 
world, and finds things very different from what they 
appeared when seen through the windows of the home 
which his father's and mother's affection colored with 
the rose and violet of their own nature. A young min- 
ister bred in a frugal, literary, and religious home, liv- 
ing a quiet life, has rather a hard experience when he 
comes to his actual work, — the world seems so different 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 279 

from what he dreamed it was, and he encounters so 
much covetousness ; hypocrisy, selfishness in its many 
forms. " It is a very bad world/ 7 says he, looking at it 
with eyes too pure for iniquity, across the New Testa- 
ment. " If it appears so to me, how damnable it must 
look to God, in whose sight the very heavens are not 
clean, and who charges the angels with folly." So some 
night, after preaching, as he walks home through the 
darkness, discouraged and despairing, and looks up to 
the stars, so old and so young, so heavenly bright, so 
distant, yet looking so large and near and familiar, — he 
says, " What is man that thou art mindful of him, and 
the Son of man that thou regarclest him?" And his 
womanly wife, who walks close at his side, whose " med- 
dling intellect" does not " misshape the form of things," 
but, like a star itself, lets God shine through her and 
sparkle out of her, answers him, saying, " He made him 
a little lower than the angels." But after our man has 
learned to orient himself in the universe, knowing which 
way the east is, after the moonlight has gone, and he 
has removed the caterpillars from the apple-trees, and 
has felt the summer, and draws towards the appointed 
w T eeks of harvest, and sees the same branches which the 
caterpillars eat in the spring now bending down with 
great rosy apples, — things look more hopeful, and he 
finds a great deal of goodness which he did not expect. 

We find that much of the wickedness we see is only 
a chance-shot the gun went off before the man was 
ready. In human action there is always more virtue of 
every kind than vice, more industry than idleness, more 
thrift than spendthrift, more temperance than intemper- 
ance, more wisdom than folly. Even the American 
politician does not tell so many lies as he tells truths. 
Sincerity is more common than hypocrisy ; no nation is 



280 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

ever affected ; the mass of men are in real earnest. All 
the natural trees grow solid all the way through ; they 
have bark on them, but it is a real bark, there is no 
veneering of mahogany on any northern pine. Even 
the hypocrisy which a man varnishes himself withal is 
only the homage which he pays to the virtue he imitates. 
It is a gilt jewel ; he does not like to pay the price of 
the gold one ; the gilt jewel is a testimonial that he 
would like to have the gold one if it did not cost too 
much. There is more conscious justice than conscious 
injustice in the world, more trust than jealousy, more 
peace than war, more men who help the good time com- 
ing than men who stave it off, more piety than impiety, 
more goodness than badness. In all the world, mankind 
never put up a single gravestone to evil, as such. There 
are many temples, no doubt, which are made dens of 
thieves, but they were all built as houses for the Father, 
not one of them ever dedicated to the devil. The 
Christian year, as put down in the calendar of the Cath- 
olics and Episcopalians, is full of saints ; but nobody 
ever publishes the Devil's Calendar, full of wicked men. 
No man will ever write on his father's tomb, " He was 
an eminent slave-trader." Mr. Mason's sons will not 
write on his tombstone, "Author of the Fugitive-slave 
Bill." No miserable minister who, for the meanest fee, 
shall stand in some pulpit, and preach funeral eulogies 
on such wicked men, will praise them for deeds of this 
kind ; he will try to varnish them over, and say they 
were mistakes. 

All these things show how constantly the good pre- 
ponderates in mankind. Do you doubt this ? Sometimes 
it does not seem so, but it all becomes plain from this 
great fact, that mankind continually improves ; for noth- 
ing is clearer than this, that the human race is perpetu- 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 281 

ally advancing in all sorts of virtue. Those Adams and 
Eves whom God sent into the world, naked and rough 
and savage as a wild ass's colt, have grown up to a 
quiet, respectable civilization, and dotted the world over 
with monuments of human excellence. Soon as a scholar 
studies history, his common sense sees this great fact, 
that the human tree grows up out of the ground, not 
down into it, and at each recurring White Sunday it is 
more beautiful with blossoms, and heavier laden with 
apples at each harvest. It would be a sorry impeach- 
ment of the great God to charge upon him that the 
world was made so badly that the wheels could never 
overcome their friction. Take the world, and you see 
no great improvement from month to month, or perhaps 
from year to year. Look at a star for ten minutes, and 
it does not seem to have moved at all; look at it at six 
o'clock and then again at twelve, and you will see that 
it has changed immensely. So look at mankind from 
one hundred years to another, and you see w T hat prog- 
ress Christendom has made. 

But not to look over so wide a field, what does any 
man see in his little sphere of observation ? Truth pre- 
vailing over error, right over wrong, piety over impiety, 
goodness over wickedness. The seed of goodness does 
not come up very quick, but it never rots in the soil ; it 
comes up at last. It does not grow very swiftly at first, 
but it does grow stout and stocky, as the farmers say of 
good substantial corn. When I see a young man with 
any truth that others have not, any justice, any kindly 
charity, any higher degree of piety, I am sure that he 
will prevail, just as certainly as that the best corn will 
ultimately be planted by the farmer, bought by the mil- 
ler, and eaten by the rest of mankind. Let a little mod- 
est minister to the smallest audience utter some new 



282 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

truth, propose some better form of religion, and though 
the timid man clutches the pulpit cushion, and does not 
dare look the church members in the face, while his 
cheek turns pale, and his eye flashes with unwonted 
light, though all the ministerial associations shall cry, 
" Away with such a fellow ! " — I go up to him and say, 
" Fear not ! Humanity is on your side, and if the swine 
trample your pearls under their feet, do not mind it : it 
is because they know no better ; one day the human 
race will sift the ground under your feet, and gather 
even the dust of the pearls and fashion it into beauty to 
wear about humanity's neck as an ornament." The 
team of elements carries you swiftly over iron roads, 
where oxen once slowly dragged you along ; and just so 
it is with all goodness. It is certain to come up when 
it is planted, sure to grow and to live forever. All this 
shows the superiority of the good in the human race 
over the evil therein. The swine that is washed may 
return to his wallowing in the mire : it is his element ; 
but the man, when the devil has been cast out, haunts 
the tombs no longer, crying, and cutting himself with 
stones. Perfection is the pole-star of humanity, and our 
little needle has its dip, and its variation, and sometimes 
declines from the pole, now at this angle, then at that, 

" But, though it trembles as it lowly lies, 
Points to that light which changes not in heaven." 

These are very encouraging things. But without 
looking so far as that, I am often struck with the amount 
of goodness all around me. Sometimes in a railroad car 
by night I love to people the hours by counting up the 
good men and women I know in all walks of life, and in 
all denominations of Christians, and some not Christian, 
and not Hebrew even, who have no religious name what- 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 283 

ever, but who have so much religion in them that they 
have not counted it yet. After all, there is only one 
.religion, just as there is but one ocean, and though you 
call it North Ocean, South Ocean, Atlantic, Pacific, it is 
still only one water. In some places it is deep, in others 
shallow j here it is cold, there warm ; it is troubled here, 
smooth there ; still it is always the same ocean, and the 
chemical qualities of the water are still the same. When 
I run over the moral inventory of the persons I know, I 
am astonished to find how many good men and women 
there are, and what a little dear kingdom of heaven 
is about us all the time, though we take small account 
of it, 

I love to look for some excellence amongst bad men, 
and almost always find it. There is no dead sea of hu- 
manity anywhere. Though you toil all night and catch 
nothing, in some lucky moment you throw over on the 
right side of the ship, and presently your net breaks 
with the draught of fishes, only not miraculous. Those 
Boston men who in Congress voted for the Fugitive- 
slave Bill, do no such thing in private, but both of them 
contributed honest money to hide the outcast, and carry 
him where the stripes of America shall never keep him 
from the stars of freedom. There are many depraved 
things done without any conscious depravity. 

See how many good things are continually coming to 
pass. Not long since this circumstance came to my 
knowledge. A Maryland woman lost her husband, a 
" fast man/' who spent more readily than he earned. He 
had the reputation of wealth, but when his estate came 
to be settled, there was no property remaining but six- 
teen slaves. His widow, a kind-hearted woman, hired 
these persons out, and lived very comfortably on their 
earnings. One day it occurred to her that it was a little 



284 THE TOWER AND ENDURANCE 

hard for her to be living on the earnings of these per- 
sons, to whom she contributed nothing. She asked one 
of the most sensible of them what she thought of it, say- 
ing, " Would you like to be free ? Why don't you run 
away ? " " We had thought of it/' was the answer, " and 
some of us came together and talked it over, but w T e said 
you had no property excepting us, and we did not like 
to bring you upon the town." The good woman was so 
much struck with this that that day she set them free. 
Some offered to bring back their wages to her. She is 
now supporting herself with her needle. This shows an 
amount of self-denial that very few men would be will- 
ing to come to. One of our own countrywomen, who 
has travelled the United States over, making exploring 
expeditions of loving-kindness and tender mercy, passing 
through wildernesses and deserts that burned with vice, 
in order to establish hospitals for the insane and lift up 
the poor, was once robbed of her purse by a highway- 
man in Georgia, who gave it back to her when he found 
it w T as Miss Dix, scorning to rob such a woman. Need I 
mention again that woman whose humanity seems sweet- 
est in the wintry darkness of Crimean war, that Nightin- 
gale of mercy who makes perpetual spring and summer 
in the desolate camp of the soldier ? No star shines so 
beautifully as a good deed in a naughty world, and there 
is not a street in Boston, however short, not a lane, how- 
ever dirty, but some window thereof burns with that 
light which shines in the darkness, though the darkness 
comprehencleth it not. If a wrong is done to anybody, 
somebody by and by finds it out. Men scourge the apos- 
tle of humanity in the market-place, but there is always 
some good woman, some kind man, to wash the apostle's 
stripes and bind up his bruises, and lay healing herbs of 
grace on the tortured flesh, and carry a soothing balm 



OP WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 285 

to the soul that smarts, but will not forbear from its 
work ; and when the martyr dies, somebody gathers up 
his ashes and sows them as seeds of goodness, one day 
to blossom all round the religious world. How many 
good men you find, always taking offices of charitable 
trust which bring no money or honor, but who will not be 
forgotten in the recompense of the just men whose 
hearts grow white and blossom with benevolence as they 
grow old. How many good Samaritans there are in the 
world, always happening to pass where somebody lies 
fallen among thieves. 

I love to walk through a library full of old books, the 
works of mighty men who once shook the ground under 
them ; yet all forgotten now ; and I think how rich- 
minded the human race is when it can afford to let such 
intellect lie, and never miss that wealth. But goodness 
is hid much oftener than great intellect. I do not mean 
that it is hid in its action, but from men's sight. But 
for each man of this stamp, there are several women. 
There is no town but has many sisters to every Lazarus, 
generous mothers, kindly aunts, faithful friends, whose 
footsteps are like those of spring, flowery to-day, in some 
weeks fruitful, — those who leave tracks of benevolence 
all through the cold and. drifted snow of selfishness 
which piles the streets of a great metropolis. It is these 
persons, women and men, who carry on the great move- 
ments of mankind. They clear and till the fields where 
some Moses, Jesus, Paul, or Luther gathers an abundant 
harvest, brought home amid the shouting of the people, 
" Hosanna ! Hosanna ! " The topstone of yonder monu- 
ment is only the highest because it rests on every block 
underneath, and the lowest and smallest helps to hold it 
up ; only the foundation was laid with sweat and sore 
toil, while the capstone was hoisted to its place amid the 



286 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

shouting of multitudes. It is in this way that all the 
great humanities are carried forward. Thev advance 
most rapidly in New England, because we have more 
men and women of this stamp amongst us than elsewhere 
are to be found in the world. Nobody knows the power 
of a good woman, in the quiet duties of her home, where 
she is wife, mother, sister, aunt ; and in the neighborly 
charities of the street and village she sets afoot powers 
of excellence which run and are not weary, or walk and 
never faint. 

You and I may not have much intellectual power ; 
perhaps our thought will never fill the world's soul, nor 
guide the world's helm ; we may not have reason enough 
to dig down to the roots of things, nor imagination 
enough to reach up to the fruits and flowers, nor memory 
to reach back to the causes, nor prophetic power to 
reach forward to their consequences. But all the little 
space within our reach we can occupy with goodness, 
and then the whole house will be filled with the fragrant 
beauty of our incense, which we offer towards man, and 
which steals up as a welcome sacrifice towards God. In 
a wintry day, I have sometimes found a geranium in some 
poor woman's kitchen, and it filled the whole house with 
its sweet fragrance. So it is with this goodness. Piety 
is the root of all manly excellence, and it branches out 
into a great many things. How you and I can increase 
this goodness in ourselves, and then in the world ; for, 
though the bodily power is capable of great increase and 
development, and you see the oclds between the thrifty 
hand of the mechanic and the clumsy hand of the Irish 
clown ; though the intellectual power is capable of won- 
drous culture, as you see how the use which the well- 
bred scholar makes of his intellect differs from the 
clumsy attainment which the poor ignorant man can only 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 287 

reach, — yet neither the cunning hand nor the cunning 
brain of man is capable of such immense development as 
those moral, afTectional, and religious faculties whose 
fairest, sweetest blossom is what we call goodness. 
And what you and I set on foot for ourselves, ere long- 
belongs to the whole world. This is the precious privi- 
lege which God gives us, that when we attain it for our- 
selves, we win it for the whole human race, and though 
when we go thitherward we carry the fragrance of our 
flower along with us, its seeds drop into the ground, and 
live forever on the earth to bless mankind. 



DISINTERESTED PHILANTHROPY. 

Sir Robert Peel, cradled in affluence, in a famous 
speech in Parliament, declared that he had no belief in 
disinterested philanthropy. You can hardly find a re- 
spectable mechanic, a respectable trader, an earnest man 
or woman in the middle class of society, who does not 
believe in disinterested philanthropy, who does not prac- 
tise it almost every day, and that too as a religious prac- 
tice. The circumstances which are about the industri- 
ous class help call into play this belief and practice of 
disinterested philanthropy. Serious men who feel the 
sore travail of the world, and eat honest bread which 
they have got by the sweat of their brow or the toil of 
their brain, will not be content to have religion a mere 
emotion in their heart, a delicious dream of devotion, a 
rhapsody of love to God. It must be also love to man. 
They will never be quite content with mere routine, with 
a mere form of ritual words and ritual worship ; both 
must lead to a form of actual, practical life with them. 



288 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

PHILANTHROPY SHALL PREY AIL. 

The thing for which I most fervently send up my 
thanks to God is the increase of piety and love towards 
the Infinite God of perfection, and that this piety takes 
the form of philanthropy, and what is abstract love of 
God becomes concrete love of man. Let us give thanks 
by putting our piety in this noble and lovely form. Be 
sure we are to triumph ; not to-day, not to-morrow ; but 
as the sun struggles with the darkness of the dawn, and 
triumphs over the clouds, and at last sends his meridian 
beams down upon the ground, so shall human philan- 
thropy triumph over the malignity, the darkness, and 
ignorance of men, and the angels below shall co-work 
with the angels above, and God's kingdom come down 
here on the earth. 



Let men laugh when you sacrifice desire to duty, if 
they will. You have time and eternity to rejoice in. 



GREAT BENEFACTORS UNRECOGNIZED. 

If you should go into a garden, ignorant of botany, 
you would see many plants seemingly of no value, and 
only a cost, but which yet turn out precious herbs or 
produce rare flowers, whose beauty is their own excuse 
for being, and excuse enough beside. So in the garden 
of mankind, which God only understands, there are vari- 
ous employments which seem at first to be of no value, 
but which turn out to be of the greatest importance. 

When Socrates left off stone-cutting, and went to teach 
philosophy at Athens, it seemed as if he did not earn, the 
poor pulse he eat and the sorry garments he continued 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 289 

to wear ; but it turned out that his talk was the most 
valuable work done in that generation. Socrates carved 
out great statues of thought, and set up colossal figures 
of men along the highway of life, to freshen and inspire 
us forever. 

When Archimedes at Syracuse, an apparent lounger, 
with a large head and thoughtful face, and brow serene 
as midnight, spent his days in drawing figures in the 
sand, circles and spheres and sines and co-sines and tan- 
gents, I take it that the fishermen in the bay thought he 
was a fool, and not worth the flounders he eat ; but when 
Syracuse was besieged by an enemy, that man was the 
king of the nation, and reaching a huge arm of wood 
over the walls of the city, he twisted and twirled and 
tumbled the ships of the foe to pieces ; and then men 
began to understand better the work of the head. 

In later years, when Galvani hung up the leg of a 
frog on an iron fence, and noticed the muscles twitch, 
his servants no doubt thought he was an idler and a 
fool ; but that was the first step in the discovery which 
now sends thought from Nova Scotia to New Orleans as 
quick as thought. 

When Homer strolled from village to village, singing 
for his supper as he went, no doubt the cheeseman, as he 
trundled his wares from one place to another, thought 
Homer a dismal drone, and grudged the poet a lodging 
in his barn ; but the " Wondrous Tale of Troy divine " 
comes down through the ages as a strain of sweet music, 
now so trumpet-like, and then so lyrical, that the poor 
farmer's boy beguiles the weary labors of the plough by 
singing it, and others catch up the strain and speed it 
on to millions more, until his high thoughts, swept into 
music on the ten strings of his sounding lyre, have be- 
come commonplaces to all men. 

19 



290 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

When Moses left the keeping of Jethro's sheep in 
Midian, and went into the mountain, no doubt the shep- 
herds thought he was a fool ; and when he was alone on 
the mountain for forty days and forty nights, the men 
of Israel thought he was asleep or a lounger ; but when 
he came back with the Ten Commandments in his head, 
he proved that there was another kind of work besides 
tending cattle. 

So when that young carpenter of Nazareth left his 
tools, probably the sandal-maker of Nazareth might 
have said, " He will never earn his shoes with all his 
preaching." But from that young carpenter of Naza- 
reth came those blessed beatitudes which have planted 
the seed of piety in many a million hearts, and which 
will never be forgotten as long as man shall endure. 

Thus from Socrates, and Archimedes, and Galvani, 
and Homer, and Moses, and Christ, comes the work of 
the world. In the great machine of human society, only 
God knows all the wheels, and many kinds of work are 
done by men whose various modes of operation we know 
not. All kinds of real work then should we honor. This 
man plays with lightning, and brings nothing to pass ; 
but his son after him takes the mail through the air. 
This man plays with soap-bubbles, and men laugh at 
him ; but his son perchance may carry us where his 
predecessor carries the mail. Thus persons apparently 
of no value may be perhaps of great service to the race 
of men if they work diligently after their kind. 



NO GOOD THING LOST. 



Mankind never loses any good thing, physical, intel- 
lectual, or moral, till it finds a better, and then the loss 



OP WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 291 

is a gain. No steps backward is the rule of human his- 
tory. What is gained by one man is invested in all men, 
and is a permanent investment for all time. What a 
careless nation drops and runs by, another carefully 
picks up and carries forward, if it -be of any service. 
No nation gives up clothes for the sake of primeval 
nakedness ; nor houses of stone, brick, and wood for a 
hole in the ground and hollow trees ; none ever abandons 
wheaten bread, the result of toil and thought, for the 
sake of acorns and wild pea-nuts. 

A great genius discovers a truth in science, the phi- 
losophy of matter ; or in philosophy, the science of man. 
He lays it at the feet of humanity, and carefully she 
weighs in her hand what was so costly to him, and is so 
precious to her. She keeps it forever ; he may be for- 
got, but his truth is a part of the breath of human-kind. 
By a process more magical than magic it becomes the 
property of all men, and that forever. 

Kepler had some of the most whimsical theories that 
ever entered into the mind of man ; but he discerned 
three great general laws which govern the heavenly 
bodies. His whims all perish ; it is only here and there 
that some black-letter scholar has found them out; but 
his laws find their place in the humblest manual of 
astronomy, are used in every school of New England, 
and will never be forgot. 

Wycliffe started the Reformation in the fourteenth 
century, — a single monk in his cell at Oxford teaching 
the great truths of Protestantism. He died in 1384, and 
it seemed as if the truths he started perished with him. 
Forty-four years after, the Council of Constance ordered 
his bones to be dug up and burned. There was not 
much left of the thin man in the little churchyard at 
Lutterworth ; but the Bishop of Lincoln sent his officers 



292 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

— vultures with a quick scent at a dead carcass — to 
ungrave him. To the spot they came, they took what 
little they could find, and burnt it to ashes, and cast it 
into the Swift, a little brook running hard by, and they 
thought they had made away both with his bones and 
his doctrines. How does it turn out? An historian says- 
thus : — " The brook took them into the Avon, the Avon 
into the Severn, the Severn into the narrow seas, they 
into the main ocean, — and thus the ashes of Wycliffe are 
the emblems of his doctrine, which is now dispersed all 
the world over." It did not lie in the power of the 
Council of Constance, the Bishop of Lincoln and his offi- 
cials, to hide one single truth from the consciousness of 
mankind. Let men hear once, and the word roots into 
that soil forever. 

In some little New-England village there comes up a 
dear feminine flower of wisdom and philanthropy, and 
by and by the whole town is fragrant with that blossom, 
and the children who are born there a hundred years 
later are better born than elsewhere in the surrounding 
towns, because that woman passed through the village 
and spread the sweetness of her character in the very 
air, and it shamed vulgar men and women out of their 
coarse obscenity, and lifted them up when they knew it 
not. Florence Nightingale, Dorothea Dix, and their no- 
ble company of similar good angels who bless the world, 
will all die, but the style of character which they repre- 
sent will never die. It will go on increasing and en- 
larging, till it fills all Christendom with its sweet and 
blessed influence. 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 293 

ALL EXCELLENCE IS PERPETUAL. 

A man gets a new truth, a new idea of justice, a new 
sentiment of religion, and it is a seed out of the flower 
of God, something from the innate substance of the Infi- 
nite Father; for truth, justice, love, and faith in the 
bosom of man are higher manifestations of God than the 
barren zone of yonder sun, fairer revelations of him than 
all the brave grandeur of yonder sky. Well, this seed 
from the flower of God takes root in the soul of man, and 
it can never be dislodged or rent away; while every 
plant which the heavenly Father has not planted is des- 
tined to be plucked up. No truth fades out of science, 
no justice out of politics, no love out of the community, 
nor out of the family. The sage, the saint, or the poet, 
gets a scion from the tree of life, and grafts it on the 
wild stock of human nature. It grows apace, flowers 
every spring, and fruits every autumn, and never fades 
away ; more than that, ere long it sucks all the life out 
of the wild ingrafted branches, and itself becomes the 
tree. A great man rises, shines a few years, and pres- 
ently his body goes to the grave, and his spirit to the 
home of the soul. But no particles of the great man are 
ever lost; they are not condensed into another great 
man, they are spread abroad. There is more Washing- 
ton in America now than when he who bore the name 
stood at the nation's head. Ever since Christ died there 
has been a growth of the Christ-like ; there is a thousand 
times more of Jesus now on the earth than when the 
Marys stood at his feet. Once there was little corn in 
the world, and a woman's lap might have held all the 
seed of the bread which now feeds the earth. Right- 
eousness grows like corn, — that out of the soil, this 
out of the soul. Let a man have more truth, more jus- 



294 THE POWER AND ENDURANCE 

tice, more love, more piety than other men, and the 
world cannot get rid of him; he rides on the shoulders 
of mankind, and they cannot cast him off. Nobody can 
write him down, or howl him down ; only himself can 
write himself down ; and he can never write down a sin- 
gle truth nor a single grain of justice he has once given 
expression to ; it is insured at the bank of the Infinite 
God. Peters may deny, and Judases sell, and Arnolds 
turn traitors ; but the truth goes on with the irresistible 
gravitation of the universe, and the silent laws of God 
conduct it onward to its triumph. 



GOOD NOT LOST AMIDST THE BAD. 

There is good in the worst of men ; there is a great 
deal of good amongst them. In Fagin's den of thieves 
Mr. Dickens paints a sweet, beautiful creature, as clear 
as a sunbeam, and not less benevolent ; and he is true to 
nature. In a great tragedy of JEschylus or Shakespeare, 
while in one scene there is a conspiracy, a murder, or a 
revolution, trial, sentence, in the next there will be some 
sweet love-scene, tender and woosome, and most ele- 
vating. As after funeral marches heavily beat on muf- 
fled drums, or painfully played by horns gagged by the 
players, the returning soldiers step to lively and more 
stirring tunes, so among the worst of men there are little 
spots of heavenly, human sunshine, — a faithful wife, 
daughter, mother ; nay, perhaps a son who redeems the 
ugliness of his father. Were not Abraham and righteous 
Lot found in the midst of Sodom? And Sodom could not 
go under in fire and brimstone t^ll these sweet angel-men 
had marched out. Was not upright Nathan, bold as a 



OF WHAT IS NOBLEST IN MAN. 295 

star, found in cruel David's wicked court? Did not 
Christ come out of Galilee ? 



EACH INDIVIDUAL EXCELLENCE FOE MANKIND'S BENEFIT. 

Men often deceive us ; they fail from weakness, nay, 
from badness. We often deceive ourselves. Conven- 
tions are not what w T e could wish ; the election disap- 
points us; revolutions turn out badly, as it seems. But 
slowly , continually, forever, truth gains over error, jus- 
tice over iniquity, love over hate, and religion over im- 
piety. It is not much that any man, however great, can 
do to the consciousness of mankind. All that Leibnitz, 
or Newton, or Bacon, or Luther, added to mankind was a 
small part of what mankind has. But even you and I 
can do something to bring about the time when all 
nations shall live as the brothers of one family ; for every 
effort which we make for our own countrymen is for the 
freedom of all mankind ; every thing that you do for the 
education of the mind, the conscience, the heart, and the 
soul of your country, your community, your family, your- 
self, is so much done towards the education of all man- 
kind. All that you do for industry, philosophy, science, 
art, for temperance, for peace, yes, all that you do for 
piety in your own heart of hearts, — that likewise will 
accrue to the advantage of mankind ; for every atom of 
goodness incarnated in a single girl is put into every 
person, and ere long spreads wide over the earth to cre- 
ate new sunshine and beauty everywhere. Thus you 
and I in our humble sphere may work with the vast 
agencies of humanity, and the Great Father in heaven 
shall work with us, through our understanding, our 
hearts, our prayers, and our toil. 



HUMAN PKOGRESS. 




MAN TO MAKE HIS OWN PARADISE. 

S you look on the world inferior to man, mineral, 
vegetable, animal, you see that all is full of order. 
The law of God is kept throughout ; the actual of nature 
comes completely up to the ideal of nature. Every ani- 
mal has internal unity, and is at peace with himself. So 
far as he has any consciousness at all, he has integrity of 
consciousness. His little dot of spirit is surrounded by 
a hedge of animal instincts so high that he never strays 
abroad and is lost. Every natural beast is contented, is 
mainly happy, unhappy only by transient fits, perma- 
nently at peace. It never violates the law of its struc- 
ture. Its general nature is the individual character 
also. The wild dog is never crazy ; it is only domestic 
dogs that go mad. The ape is said to be stupid ; but 
stupid is no reproach to him, no source of pain ; he 
brings up his children just as well as the Faculty of 
Harvard College could do it for him or themselves. No 
wild goose is idiotic or a simpleton. If dogs delight to 
bark .and bite, it is because it is their nature to do so. 
If bears and lions growl and fight, it is because growling 
and fighting are their natural functions. No one of the 
Ten Commandments which God published on his Sinai 
to the beasts is ever violated by dog or lion. The father 
alligator eats up his little ones, and feels no remorse ; it 

296 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 297 

is part of his natural food ; the mother never reproaches 
him for his taste ; there is harm, but no wrong ; hurt, 
but never injury. Natural instinct keeps the police of 
the animals as perfect as gravitation keeps order in the 
sky. No wild bull ever oppresses the herd of bulls that 
he rules over ; his administration is perfectly constitu- 
tional ; the politics of the herd are all made for them. 
God is the legislative, judiciary, executive power ; the 
cattle are only tools, factors always, agents never. No 
wild swine is a glutton ; he is as temperate as a vegeta- 
rian. With the animals, from the smallest emmet to the 
, largest mastodon, death is but a momentary pang ; it is 
not thought of before it comes in sight ; the loss of asso- 
ciates is soon forgot. Family union is provisional, no 
more, not final ; a brief conjunction, not permanent, of 
life-long affection. So is the parental instinct; it is a 
fact for the season, no more. If a snow-storm in April 
destroys the robins by bushels, as it has done the last 
month in New York, the survivors do not go into mourn- 
ing ; the next fair, warm day brings out the same sweet 
carol as before ; the Golgotha of robins echoes with the 
melodious twitter of the unreflecting birds ; they pair 
anew, and build their procreant nests ; no memento mori 
stares them in the face ; their countenance is never 
" sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." In all the 
animal world, nervous activity, sensitiveness, is per- 
fectly balanced by the power of muscular endurance. 
All the laws of nature are made for them, and all are 
kept. Their characters are not their work any more 
than the uniform color of their skin. They ask not if 
Duty's eye be on them. 

There is no morality, no immorality, no doubt, no re- 
morse. All is the work of Providence. It seems as if 
it were very fortunate to have your character made for 



298 HUMAN PROGRESS. 

you, your condition insured in your instincts. And it is 
the good fortune of the beasts ; their lot has fallen to 
them in pleasant places, and the arms of the great God 
are about the hairy or the feathered creatures, the 
winged, or the finned, or the creeping things that he has 
made. 

In the world of man it is altogether different. While 
the beasts have their paradise around them, made be- 
forehand, man's paradise is before him. Theirs is to be 
passively enjoyed ; man's is to be created by himself, 
and then actively enjoyed. The beast's character is his 
nature, in its instinctive development. Man is to make 
his character out of his nature ; not by instinctive action 
alone, but by reflective, voluntary action as well. God 
is sole providence to the dog, the bear, and the lion. 
Man is partly his own providence, working with God, 
who has taken man into that partnership, to share the 
higher risk, and to share the profit. The individual 
beast is progressive only from birth to his adult years ; 
there he stops ; the lion is no more in the nineteenth 
century after Christ than he was in the nineteenth cen- 
tury before Christ. The family of beasts has no prog- 
ress of the species. 

" Such as creation's dawn beheld, such are they now." 

Man advances continually. No man is full-grown. 
Jesus will not be called good ; his ideal haunts him and 
shames his actual. The cat and dog and ox kind are 
fast moored by Providence in the same harbor ; the fleet 
of animals rides at anchor all their life ; but mankind 
looses from port, and sails the sea with God, driven by 
every wind, voyaging to other shores and continents 
continually new. " Nothing venture, nothing have." 

Why is it so ? Why did God, while binding nature 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 299 

fast in fate, set free the human will ? I know not. This 
I do know ; out of his infinite wisdom and love, he con- 
fers the greatest possible blessing on beast and man. 
He gave to the beasts what was best for them. Unpro- 
gressive here, who knows that they shall not be pro- 
gressive likewise in some hereafter that waits for the 
emmet and the lion ? God made man for a higher lot ; 
the beast to have his condition insured in his instinct, 
man to produce his condition. It is good fortune for the 
beast to be found — to man it is a great blessing that he 
is left to make — his own character. 



THE FALSE IDEA OF MAN A HINDERANCE TO HIS PROGRESS. 

I know of no cause which so cripples mankind in 
Christendom as the false doctrine that he can of himself 
do nothing, and be nothing ; that he must not trust his 
very highest faculties in their moral activity ; that his 
righteousness is as filthy rags. This doctrine runs 
through Christian literature, and stains the hymns, ser- 
mons, and prayers of many an able, educated, and well- 
meaning minister, who stands in his pulpit and manipu- 
lates and magnetizes his hearers into a numb palsy of 
the soul. 



Nobody can surpass mankind with impunity ; he who 
does so must pay for U. 



300 HUMAN PKOGRESS. 

MAN 7 S PROGRESS NOT BY MIRACLE, BUT BY THE USE OP 
NATURAL FORCES. 

Rome was not built in a day. In all affairs, time is an 
important element. The Great Eastern was long in 
building, and long in getting launched. In much time, 
and for much time, are all great things done. Slowly 
and tranquilly the productive works of nature go on. 
God's infinite power works slow, alike in the world of 
matter and the world of man ; nothing by leaps, all by 
steps, never a miracle, ever a law. How long was the 
earth in getting fit for plants, animals, men ! How slow 
grow up the trees ! Within ten miles of us there is a 
grove of oaks which, brooded by the ground, had left 
the shell before Columbus was a boy ; they are growing 
still, and I gathered acorns from them last autumn. 
How slowly the human race achieves its destination, 
little by little. You and I are hasty, and want the end 
without the means ; we cry out, " How long, Lord ? " 
But that Infinite Power, so terrible when considered as 
blind fate, so dear and beautiful when known as wise 
providence, says never a word in human speech, but 
does continually, in fact, in much time, and for all time. 
All things have a slant forward, but a gradual and a 
slight one. Israel is a little in advance of Egypt, Greece 
of Israel, the Roman Church of the Hebrew or Heathen, 
the German of the Roman, and the American has already 
got a little beyond any European church. Whatever 
excellence one generation gains, after it all generations 
keep. Continually is God speaking to men, hearing, 
understanding, remembering, for all time, — ever-giving 
God, ever-taking man. Through you and me doth Causal 
Power create forever, and through us doth the same 
Providential Power conserve forever what is good. 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 301 

As we look forward, how dull and slow time seems. 
From the now of desire to the then of satisfaction, the 
road looks long; and what a heavy-footed creature is 
this dull beast of Nature ! 

"How slow the year's dull circle seems to run, 
When the bright minor pants for twenty-one ! " 

To the school-girl how long are the last six days be- 
fore Christmas ; to the politician how interminable the 
week before election, while he cannot tell who shall be 
governor. Some prophetic patriot looks on America, 
and has his brilliant hope : he sees the day when demo- 
crats shall live democracy ; there shall be no bondsmen 
then, white or black ; drunkenness and ignorance will be 
taken away, and want and crime, bereft of these ugly 
parents, in whose shadow they walk, will also be dead 
and gone ; the children of Irish beggars, now shod by 
your charity, and fed by the crumbs from lavish or par- 
simonious tables, will boast of "Our Puritanic Fathers," 
for the Celtic blood will have become mingled with the 
Saxon, as Angle, Norman, and Dane have mixed their 
blood before, which runs now in your humanity and mine ; 
then the Ethiopian shall have changed his skin, and the 
African, baptized by our covetousness as slave, shall 
come white out of the American Jordan, clean as Naaman 
of old from his leprosy, and the scar of the fetter and 
lash be no more visible on the bondsman's child than the 
stain of Anglo-Saxon, Norman, Danish piracy marks 
your face or mine. Our patriot sees that good time 
coming when the war of business shall be changed into 
industrial peace, the co-operation of toil and thought, and 
as great a blessing thence follow to mankind as now 
there is from the present diminution of war and the ceas- 
ing of religious persecution. The ideal hovers over our 



302 HUMAN PROGRESS. 

patriot's head, and he wonders when this bird of paradise 
shall light and build her spicy nest ; and rear her young, 
to beautify the air with such celestial sight and sound. 
" How long ? " cries he, " Lord, how long ? How slow 
the ages roll ! Why is his chariot so long in coming? " 
and he would fain have a miracle, and God do in a mo- 
ment what it will take mankind a hundred or a thousand 
years to work out. But the Infinite God makes no mir- 
acle, trusting America's destination to the great human 
civilizing forces which are concentrated in the men of 
America, and the circumstances which girt her round. 
Why should God miraculously put forward the hands on 
the great dial-plate of eternity ? The hour will strike in 
time ; the machinery, never so complicated, is yet per- 
fect, and will do its work just at the hour. 

Two thousand years ago that great religious genius, 
the manliest man of manly men, whom Christendom 
yet worships as its God, uttered his grand beatitudes, 
and foresaw what would be, what must be, when the 
golden rule of man's nature, and so of God's, shall be- 
come the carpenter's square, the trader's yard-stick, the 
rule by which the merchant shall straighten his columns 
and regulate his accounts. On the two commandments, 
love to God, and love to man, were to hang not only all 
the law and the prophets, but the church, state, commu- 
nity, family, man and woman. When he saw all this, I 
do not wonder that he thought God would intervene and 
miraculously aid the work at once. The Old-Testament 
poetry told him of miracles ; that, as the Israelites fled 
from Egypt, the Red sea opened and closed ; that the 
rocks, moved with compassion, shed water for the peo- 
ple's thirsty mouths ; that the quails flew to their camp 
and fed them, and filled the place round about a yard 
deep with their meat ; that for forty years the heavens 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 303 

rained manna down, and fed them with angels' bread ; 
that the earth opened her mouth and swallowed up 
wicked men. In such an age, when men fancied that 
God wrought out his great designs only by intervening 
with a miracle, I wonder not that such a man, so born, 
with such genius in him, so bred, with such deference to 
the miraculous, should say, " This generation shall not 
pass till all these things be fulfilled ; " " There be some 
standing here which shall not taste of death till they se*e 
the Son of Man coming in his kingdom ; " " Therefore 
take no thought for the morrow ; " and, " Seek first the 
kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these 
things shall be added to you;" — miraculously added, 
for God, who took thought for the ravens, would take 
more thought for them. And when he saw his schemes 
fail, that Jerusalem, which he would have folded to his 
heart, persecuted the prophets, and turned also against 
him, when the scribes and Pharisees mocked at him, and 
spit on him, and crucified him, I wonder not that he 
broke out, " My God ! my God ! why hast thou forsaken 
me ? " — and yet there came the wiser thought, " Father, 
forgive them, for they know not Avhat they do." 

Some years later, when the young wife gathered up 
the dead limbs of her husband, and folded her babies to 
her breast, or when, still more common, the husband 
himself was baptized in the blood of his martyred wife, — 
woman runs before that other disciple and in all matters 
of the heart and soul comes soonest to the end; — I do 
not wonder that men and women expected miracles, and 
said, " The world must end if men suffer this much 
longer ; eternity shall take the place of time, and we who 
suffer under the lash shall judge angels." I do not won- 
der they thought so. But it was not so to be. The old 
constant mode of operation still went on, with never a 



304 HUMAN PROGRESS. 

miraculous act of the primeval power, never a break in 
the long continuity of man's historic march, from Adam 
to Jesus, and from Jesus down. The force that God put 
into mankind, that was sufficient to do the work in time, 
and time was part of the plan. That grand idea of Jesus, 
his kingdom of heaven on earth, as he called it some- 
times, which he thought so close at hand, turned out to 
be only an ideal which hovered over men's heads, and has 
led the way through many a red sea of war, over many 
a dry and thirsting wilderness, and still our feet come 
not yet to that promised land : for that kingdom of 
heaven is not to be given by God's instantaneous mira- 
cle, but to be won by man's continual thought and toil ; 
not found, but to be made, and the making of it is worth 
as much as the enjoying it when it shall be made. 

This is indispensable to the religious education of 
mankind, and if the desire of Jesus and the early Chris- 
tians could have been brought about, if the Son of Man 
could have come in his glory, and men could have been 
clothed like the ravens, and fed as these flowers from the 
natural ground and sky, — it would have been all over 
with man, the poor creature would have dwindled and 
peaked and pined from off the earth. He was not made 
so to be treated. So is it in all the great affairs of man, in 
the march of humanity, whereunto Divine Providence is 
leader, marshalling us to battles we could not shun, and 
to victories we dreamed not of. Then when it is over, 
we see it were not well for Divine Providence to inter- 
fere, and by a moment's miracle give mankind what he 
offers us as the recompense of toil and thought for many 
an age. The prophecy of Jesus, and the prayers of the 
Christian martyrs and their worse martyred friends, are 
not fulfilled by miracle, but, better yet, the Paradise of 
God achieves itself by mankind's normal work. 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 305 

POWER OF THE HUMAN WILL OVER CIRCUMSTANCES. 

The power of human nature by will to make new cir- 
cumstances out of human instinct is greater far than the 
power to change matter into tools for human work. In 
1614, when Captain John Smith coasted New England, 
what a country it was ! — its features grim with rocks, 
its face shaggy with woods, hoarse with the voices of 
the wild winds, wild beasts, and wilder men. Now what 
a change, from the roar of the forest to the murmur of 
the city ! But this human New England of to-day differs 
from the human New England of 1614, more than the 
material New England of this day differs from the mate- 
rial New England of that. 

What if some Captain John Smith could have coasted 
the human world, thirty, or forty, or only twenty thou- 
sand years ago, and made a chart of the coast of man- 
kind, set down the attainments of human experience, and 
recorded the soundings of human consciousness. Why, 
what a world of man he would have found ! — man with 
only instinct, naked in body, naked in mind ; without a 
house or tools, without experience of art, without law or 
religion, without manners or language ; a brute and 
silent herd of men, subordinate to the forces of material 
nature, frozen by the north, burned by the south, scared 
by thunder, devoured by beasts ; men with no state, no 
church, no community, no marriage ; men in herds, as 
fear or instinct gathered them ; men in droves, as some 
hooting giant scared them together. He would have 
found the young protected only by the descending in- 
stinct of mankind, the child often a victim to his mother's 
caprice, the father sacrificing his cub when startled by a 
dream, like Abraham in the Old Testament. He would 
have found the old men and women left to the weak mer- 

20 



306 HUMAN PROGRESS. 

cies of the ascending instinct, often left to perish, and 
sometimes slain in most dire extremity. 

Then let him come and coast the world anew, survey- 
ing the headlands of human experience, and sounding the 
deeps of human consciousness, and he finds that New 
England has tamed the world of matter, has organized 
human nature. Mind mixed with the Connecticut is a 
mill ; mixed with iron is a railroad or a boat ; mixed with 
lightning is a carrier-boy from land to land. Reason 
mixed with human instinct makes a greater change. 
Mind joined with passion is a family ; conscience joined 
with instinct is society ; ambition united with mind and 
conscience is a state. The family, community, and state 
are the most marvellous visible tools of man. The 
school is the garden for the intellect, the college is the 
greenhouse for the nicer intellectual plants, which are 
tropical as yet, and cannot bear the world's cold atmos- 
phere. But nature is a great nursery for the mind, the 
conscience, the affections, and the soul ; and the minister 
should be a seedsman and florist, a nursery-gardener of 
the spirit, seeking all the world over for the choicest 
seeds and nicest scions to sow or graft, continually get- 
ting new varieties of good to make the world blossom 
with. A home is the choice garden-bower of the world, 
where two vines, which have wooed one another out from 
all the world, twine together, tendril and clasper and 
branch and stem, till the two flame into one prophetic 
bloom. 

Man's power over nature is immense, by its laws to 
make new circumstances that shall favor him. Seethe 
results in the annual crop of tools, cattle, corn. But 
the power of human nature over human instinct is im- 
menser still, by its laws to make new circumstances, do- 
mestic, social, ecclesiastical, and political. See the re- 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 307 

suits thereof in the animal crop of truth, of justice, of 
love, of religion. In 1834 England raised an iron crop 
which weighed two million of tons. What was it to the 
crop of justice which England raised that year, which 
emancipated eight hundred thousand men? Material 
circumstances must affect man for good or ill ; that is 
the law of God. But He has so made the world that 
when man knows what circumstances favor his body or 
spirit, he can himself then create them, and use the mate- 
rial world as a great inclined plane to slope upward from 
the savage to the saint. 



THE NECESSITY FOR AN IDEAL. 

The difference between the ideal and the actual per- 
vades all self-respectful earnest work. It is only the 
young bantam of poets who is wholly satisfied with the 
frivolous rhymes he throws forth, the penny-a-liner who 
is contented with the jingle of his thin and empty verses ; 
while the lofty bard, whom all the Muses crown with 
their ninefold wreath of loveliness, is worn with disquiet, 
and vexed with care, to tend the sacred fire committed 
to his charge. Only the sign-dauber is satisfied with 
the Washingtons and Franklins he pillories for the public 
eye ; but to Angelo's vision a greater Moses looked out 
from the marble and shamed his sculpture ; and a fairer 
Madonna smiled above every Virgin Raphael drew. No 
institution ever comes up to its ideal, it only draws near 
to it. How self-respectful Paul rates the churches he 
founded ! How Cromwell chides the parliament of his 
day ! How the stern Puritans of New England rebuked 
the churches, for their pride and self-conceit and unwill- 
ingness to endure for the truth's sake ! It is a pleasing 



308 HUMAN PROGRESS. 

sight to see men doing well, but not content to let well 
alone, impatient to do better ; to see nations doing so, 
reforming their constitutions, revolutionizing' the first 
ideas of their government to get nearer the ideal. I 
take little interest in a man who knows nothing of this 
struggle, with no ideal, who makes no more progress in 
the world than the Rock of Gibraltar or the Colossus of 
Rhodes. King David is the most interesting of all the 
Hebrew kings, not merely on account of the superior 
genius of his character, but because we see the battle 
between his ideal of a perfect man and the ugly fact 
which he knew his life to be. This having an ideal, bet- 
ter than the fact, to struggle for, I say, is natural and 
indispensable to a man who respects himself, is earnest, 
and trusts his God. 



DEATH A BLESSING TO MAN. 



It is a good thing for a man to be born into the flesh, 
and wear it awhile, and after he has done his work it is 
a good thing for him to be born out of the flesh, and live 
elsewhere ; and if we live natural lives, we shall one 
day be glad to die out of the body, and shall only regret 
that fact because we leave our friends grieving with 
some natural tears in their eyes. 

What a world it would be if nobody died ! How old- 
fashioned, and conservative, and bigoted it would be- 
come! The very babies would be born old-fashioned 
children, and no man would be permitted to marry until 
a thousand years old, nor allowed to vote till one-and- 
twenty hundred. If the majority of voters were three 
or four hundred years old, what progress would be pos- 
sible ? Tubal Cain — to borrow him from the Old Tes- 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 309 

tament — would object to all improvements in the iron 
manufacture, because he must learn something new ; 
and Noah to all improvements in ship-building ; and 
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would be opposing agricul- 
tural societies, and Samuel prohibiting any amendment 
of the constitution, and Job's friend Elihu would think 
nobody wise but old men ; the prophets, even the most 
radical of them, would turn out to be nothing but priests, 
and old reformers would have gone to seed, and be as 
bearded and prickly and grim as thistles in September. 
Even the saints would be as odious as the mummies now 
are ; and ancient fine ladies, remembering to have 
waltzed with Nebuchadnezzar, aired themselves at the 
opening of the Hanging Gardens, assisted at the conse- 
cration of the first Pyramids, or talked ancient Egyptian 
with the first dynasty of kings, would be putting down 
all rival aspiring beauties, just blossoming out of new 
buds, fair as truth, and welcome as liberty. God be 
thanked that we are born, and also that in due time we 
pass out of this world, and carry to that brighter sphere 
a few grains of goodness gathered here. 



THE FOUNDERS OP NEW ENGLAND — THE TRUE WAY TO 

HONOR THEM. 

From 1600 to 1700 there were great discoveries. 
Electricity and the circulation of the blood were found 
out; telescopes and thermometers were invented. There 
were a few great men writing great books, — Galileo, 
Kepler, Newton, Bacon, Leibnitz, Locke ; mighty men 
crowded into a single century. But the greatest work 
done in that century was that of the Puritan setting his 
foot in New England. Suppose New England had been 



310 HUMAN PROGRESS. 

peopled with men of no higher principles than peopled 
Cuba or Carolina or Georgia, — what would America be ? 
For two hundred years it has incessantly been making 
proclamation of the results of this work. Well, all that 
could be done by men with nothing but the fear of God, 
with no faith in him as the Infinite Father, but with faith 
in him as a King, with but little faith in man, by men 
afraid of human nature, afraid of the devil, and afraid of 
God. Their heroism was exceedingly imperfect. They 
re-enacted the tyranny they fled from. The heroism of 
love they knew nothing of. They did not love th& red 
man, nor the black man. They did .not love their God ; 
they feared him, and swore they would keep his law. 

We reverence the founders of New England. It is 
better to have been born of that stock than of kings and 
nobles. How shall we honor them? Not by praying 
their prayers and believing their creeds. The times 
call on us for a nobler heroism than that, — for the hero- 
ism of men who reverence God as the Infinite Father. 
Man is his highest work. Fidelity to our whole nature 
is our own highest duty. It is not the heroism of fear, 
— the time for that has gone by, — but it is the heroism 
of love. You and I are not called on to leave father and 
mother for religion's sake, only to be faithful to our own 
soul and to be true to our God, come what may. But 
there is as much demand for heroism of spirit now as 
ever, only the duty is not so difficult, and no man perils 
his life, only his respectability. To the heroism of our 
fathers, in highest reverence, let us add the nobler vir- 
tues, the heroism of love, which works not with pike 
and gun, but with firm justice and patience. Let us 
build our fathers' monument, not of marble, but of men, 
building a church on faith in the Infinite Father, and 
faith in man as the true Son of God ; our state on the 



HUMAN PKOGRESS. 311 

unchanging justice of the Father and the unalienable 
rights of man ; our society on the golden platform of 
mutual respect, forbearance, and love ; our individual 
character on free piety, free goodness, and free thought ; 
— and we shall carry on the work which our fathers be- 
gun, and some two hundred and thirty years after us 
there will be a long track across the world, where the 
grass is greener and the flowers fairer and more fragrant, 
because our feet have trod the soil. Then men shall 
say of us, — " Poor and humble men, they saw but a 
few things. They reverenced their fathers, but they 
did not hug their bones ; they were true to their own 
consciousness, and all the world is better because these 
men have been." 



THE PROPHECY OF THE PAST TO THE FUTURE. 

What has been done in the last half-century is a great 
achievement looked at as history, — we may thank God 
for that, — but I had rather look at it as prophecy. The 
progress in material things in America, the increase in 
power over nature throughout the Christian world, the 
rapidity of communication, the desire for freedom of 
body and soul, the improvements in political institutions 
and ideas, the progress in the churches, and of the laws, 
and in the great philanthropies of our time, — these to 
me are a prophecy of a nobler triumph of mankind, a 
greater victory of religion than the highest sages ever 
dared to foretell in their inspired oracles. They all 
point to a time when man shall be deemed the noblest 
of God's works, and shall have dominion over nature, 
and shall develop his spirit to the fulness of the stature 
of a perfect man. They point to a society where the 



312 HUMAN PROGRESS. 

qualities of a man shall be deemed more and greater 
than the property of a man, a society where the strong 
shall help the weak ; to a church where respect is paid 
to human nature, where man reverences the free spirit- 
ual individuality of man, where God is worshipped as 
the Infinite Father, not with fear, but with love ; where 
religion is confessed to be free piety, free goodness, free 
thought ; where nature, material and human, is recog- 
nized as the scripture of God ; where truth is the creed, 
and faith and works are the two great forms of commu- 
nion with God and man ; a church which, like this great 
soul of Christ, goes to seek and save that which is lost, 
and under him sees Satan falling as lightning out of 
heaven; to a state whose statutes recognize the unalien- 
able rights of all men to life, liberty, property, to a free 
development of their nature, a state whose law is justice, 
and the welfare of the negro's child is as carefully cared 
for as the welfare of the whole state, and any insult 
offered to it by a man is as promptly redressed as an in- 
sult by a nation to the majesty of the state. Yes, I 
think history points to a world where the nations shall 
learn war no more, nor count men of other speech as 
strangers, but shall seek to make a Christian world 
where nations shall dwell together, one great family, in 
love and peace. All this must come. Ideas which are 
now but sentiments, which are nothing but a tendency, 
will one day be a fact ; as Christ's Sermon on the Mount, 
they will make a new literature, church, state, and 
world ; they will make all things new. 



HUMAN PROGRESS. 313 

THE NEXT HALF-CENTURY. 

This is the first Sunday of a half-century. We stand 
on the confines of two ages. The men who fought the 
Revolution are dead, and the harvest of their labors is 
about us ; their memory is in our hearts ; let them pass 
on with our blessing only. The last year has brought 
us joy, and it has brought us grief. Some of you during 
its progress have found a fitting mate, and have rejoiced 
in the dear name of husband and wife. Some of you 
have felt the breath of your first-born, and by this sweet 
tie have been linked to this world. Others have laid 
clown in the grave husband or wife, parent or child, or 
dearest and most heart-beloved friend. Joys and sor- 
rows have come, — what have they done for us ? Have 
they made us better? Have they made us worse? 
That is the question, — not what we have had, but what 
we have earned and made out of it. The time that God 
has given us, how have we woven it into a life ? 

How few of these here to-day saw the beginning of 
the last half-century ! Only a few venerable heads, 
which I see gladly before my eyes. How few of us will 
see the close of the next ! Not one in ten of us all. 
God will send down his blessed angel of death to carry 
us, year by year, heavenward to himself. Only some of 
these little ones will remember that they heard the half- 
century ushered in by one whose name will be forgot- 
ten then in the crowd of wiser and better and more en- 
lightened men who will come after me and take my 
place. But of us all, how few will there be who fifty 
years hence can look back on this day and remember 
these flowers ! To such persons I would say, Remem- 
ber the prophecy which I have got out of these last fifty 
years, and be faithful to that ; and then fifty years hence 



314 HUMAN PROGRESS. 

teach the young children to prophesy as fairly for the 
next half-century to come. Long ere this century shall 
end, I and most of you will have gone home to our God. 
We may carry good report ; before we go, we may 
achieve a noble manhood. How much we can do in a 
year ! How much of wisdom, of justice, of goodness, 
and of holiness, we can gain in ten years ! What cubits 
we can add to our stature ! The end of life is to be a 
man ; all other things, marriage, paternity, joy, sorrow, 
are only means ; that is the end. Joy will come to you. 
Every year will bring sorrow. Will you complain of 
that ? Does not the same God give us winter and sum- 
mer ? How beautifully can we use them both ! How 
nobly we can build up ourselves, how blessedly our fam- 
ilies ! You and I can help accomplish that prophecy, 
can help form that Christian society, church, state, and 
world, whereof I have spoken; and in 1901, though the 
snow lie on our forgotten grave, we shall be at peace, 
gone home to our Father in the kingdom of heaven, 
amid joys and satisfactions which the eye has not seen 
nor the ear heard, and which the heart of man has not 
conceived of; and though the snow rest on our unre- 
corded grave, and our name be forgotten, we can leave 
a world behind us that is better and fairer and holier be- 
cause we have lived in it ; and rising to our own stat- 
ure, we shall have taught little children to rise to a 
stature greater than our own, and by their Christianity 
to shame the poor religion which you. and I had learned 
to live. 



JESUS OF NAZAKETH. 



THE CHAEACTER OP JESUS. 

IT is plain that Jesus was a man of large intellectual 
character. He had an uncommon understanding, 
was clear in his sight, shrewd in his judgment, extraor- 
dinarily subtle in his arguments, coming to the point 
with the quickness of lightning. What an eye he had 
for the beauty of nature, — the little things under his 
feet, the great things all about him ; for cities set on a 
hill, and for the heavens over his head ! What an eye 
for the beauty of the relations of things ! He saw a 
meaning in the salt without savor, with which men were 
mending the streets, not fit even for the dunghill, — and 
what a lesson he drew from it ! He saw the beauty of 
relation in the lilies, clad by God in more beauty than 
kingly Solomon ; in the ravens, who gather not into 
storehouses and barns, and yet the Great Father feeds 
and shelters them under his own godly wings. He had 
reason also which saw intuitively the great universal 
law of man's nature. And as the result of this threefold 
intellect, he had an eloquence which held crowds of men 
about him till they forgot hunger, thirst, and weariness, 
even the drawing-on of night. He had a power of rea- 
soning which sent away the scholarly Pharisee, who had 
journeyed all the way from Jerusalem to confute this 
peasant. His eloquence was quite peculiar. His mind 

315 



316 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

full of great ideas, his heart aflame with noble senti- 
ments, — he knew how to put these into the homeliest 
words, and yet give them the most lovely and attractive 
shape. In that common speech, Religion was the text, 
his commentary was the salt without savor, the raven 
flying over his head, the lilies of the valley, the grass, 
dried in the sun yesterday, to-day heating the earthen 
vessel whereon a poor woman clapped her unbaked 
bread ; it was the tower of Siloam, which fell on men not 
worse than the survivors ; it was the temple, the great 
idol of the nation, of which should be left not one stone 
upon another : all these were his commentaries. It was 
no vulgar mind that could weave such things into com- 
mon speech ia a moment, and make the heavens come 
down, and the earth come up, — with marvellous rapidity 
and instinctive skill, seizing and using every implement 
that might serve as a medium between his heavenly 
thought and the understandings of common men. When 
he spoke, some said that it thundered ; some said that 
an angel spoke ; and some said it was the eloquence of 
genius. Studying in the schools makes nothing like it. 

Then there is this peculiarity about his intellect. In 
reading the first three Gospels, you find in him a mind 
which does not so much generalize by a copious induc- 
tion from a great many facts ; but it sees the law, as a 
woman sees it, from a very few principles. And so there 
is less of philosophical talent than of philosophical ge- 
nius. You are surprised more at the nice quality of this 
intellect, than at its great quantity. On this account he 
anticipated experience. There is not a single word in 
the three Gospels which betrays the youth of Jesus. 
You would all say, — Behold a full-grown man, long 
familiar with the wavs of men. You would never think 
he was a young man, scarce thirty years old. But I do 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 317 

not say you find in Jesus at thirty the immense philo- 
sophical reason which marks Socrates, Aristotle, and 
Bacon at sixty or seventy, in the maturity of their wis- 
dom ; nor would I say that you find such monuments of 
imagination as you meet at every step in Milton, Shake- 
speare, or Dante ; nor that you find such a vast and 
comprehensive understanding as you meet in the prac- 
tical managers of states and empires. The thing would 
not be possible. In the Old Testament you find the 
writings of some men of distinguished ability, — the 
author of the Book of Job, of various parts of the Book 
of Proverbs, of Ecclesiasticus, of Ecclesiastes, of the 
Wisdom of Solomon, of the Prophecy of Isaiah. They 
were men of very large intellect, old, familiar with men, 
had seen peace and instituted war, knew the ways of the 
market-house and of kings' courts. In comparison, the 
words of Jesus, a Nazarene peasant, only thirty years 
old, are fully up to the highest level of their writings. 
You never feel that he was inferior to them in intellec- 
tual grasp. 

Now the common idea that Jesus received this intel- 
lectual power from miraculous inspiration destroys all 
the individuality of his character, — for it makes him 
God, or else a mere pipe on which God plays. In either 
case there is nothing human about it, and it is of no use 
to us. 

But his greater greatness came not from the intellect, 
but from a higher source. It is eminence of conscience, 
heart and soul ; in one word, it is religious eminence. 
Here are the proofs of it : He makes religion consist in 
piety and morality, not in belief in forms, not in outside 
devotion. He knew it is a very easy thing to be devout 
after the common fashion, as easy to make prayers as to 
fill your hand with dust from the street. Was it a little 



318 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

thing in Jesus to declare that religion consisted in piety 
and morality ? All the world over, the priests made reli- 
gion to consist in forms, rituals, mutilating the body and 
spirit, in attending to artificial ordinances. Jesus summed 
up all the law and the prophets in love to God and love 
to man. Men worshipped the Sabbath ; he religiously 
broke it. They thought God loved only the Jew, and 
above all some Jewish priest, with bells on his garments ; 
but lie set up a travelling Samaritan as the religious 
man. What a gnashing of teeth there was in the Jeru- 
salem Association when he said the Samaritan was a 
great man ! Doubtless it was a story founded on fact, 
— some good-natured Samaritan, jogging on his donkey 
from Jerusalem to Jericho, seeing the poor man, and 
giving him his sympathy and aid. It took a man of 
great religious genius to say that two thousand years 
ago ; it is a rare thing to comprehend it to-day. See 
the same thing in his love of the wicked. He went to 
cure the sick ; not to cure the righteous, and save the 
well. His sympathy was with the oppressed and trod- 
den down, and very practical sympathy it was too. The 
finest picture of an ideal gentleman which antiquity has 
left is contained in the Book of Job. But Job's ideal 
gentleman is very proud, overbearing to men beneath 
him. " Their fathers," said he, " I would have disdained 
to set with the dogs of my flock. 7 ' The Book of Job is 
one of the best in the Old Testament, — full of poetry, 
which is a small thing ; and full of piety and morality, 
which is a great thing. This is the limitation of that 
ideal gentleman. Now Jesus goes out to that despised 
class of men, and says he came to seek and save them. 
Was that a small thing? Even to-day, in democratic 
Boston, to be a minister to the poor is a reproach. He 
is esteemed the most fortunate minister who is minis- 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 319 

tered unto, and not who ministers. The man who in 
Boston gathers crowds of men from the common walks 
of life, — what is he called ? " A preacher to the rab- 
ble/' — that is the ecclesiastical title. What was it in 
the old civilization two thousand years ago, — a civiliza- 
tion controlled by priests and soldiers, who had a sword 
to offer to the beggar and the slave, and who looked 
with haughty scorn, like Aristotle and Cicero, on men 
who got their bread by the work of their hand ? 

The third thing was his trust in God. The Hebrews 
were and are more remarkable for their faith in God than 
any other nation that ever lived. In this, Jesus was a 
Hebrew of Hebrews, the most eminent of his tribe m 
this vast quality. But witness that his faith was in a 
God who loved all men, in the God who went out to 
meet the prodigal, and met him a great way off, and fell 
on his neck and kissed him, and was more joyous over 
one sinner that repented than over ninety-nine that 
needed no repentance. The first Gospel does not under- 
stand this, and therefore denies the width of Jesus' faith 
in God, and makes him limit his ministry to his own na- 
tion ; but the second and third Gospels put it beyond a 
doubt. 

Now the impression that he has made on the world, 
the character of his influence, the opinion which the hu- 
man race has formed of him, — all confirm this judgment, 
derived from the historical record of his words and 
works. It seems to me that his actual character was 
higher than the character assigned to Jehovah in the 
Old Testament, to Zens in Greece, or Jupiter in Rome. 
He made a revolution in the idea of God, and himself 
went up and took the throne of the world. That was a 
step in progress ; and if called upon to worship the 
Jehovah of the Old Testament, or Jesus of Nazareth, a 



320 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

plain man, as he is painted in the first three Gospels, I 
should not hesitate, I should worship my brother; for in 
the highest qualities this actual man is superior to men's 
conception of God. He loves men of all nations, is not 
angry with the wicked every day ; hating sin, he has the 
most womanly charity for the sinner. Jesus turned the 
heathen gods out of the heathen heaven, because he was 
more God than they ; and he ascended the throne of 
Jehovah, because in his life he gave more proofs of jus- 
tice and love than Jehovah, as he is represented in the 
Old Testament. Let us not be harsh ; let us not blame 
men for worshipping the creature more than the Creator. 
They saw the Son higher than the Father, and they did 
right. The popular adoration of Jesus to-day is to me 
the best thing in the popular ecclesiastical religion. 

But I do not believe in the perfection of Jesus, that he 
had no faults of character, was never mistaken, never 
angry, never out of humor, never dejected, never de- 
spairing. I do not believe that from his cradle to his 
cross he never did, nor said, nor felt, nor thought, a 
wrong thing. To say that was his character, I think 
would be as absurd as to say that he learned to walk 
without stumbling, or to talk without stammering, or 
could see as well at three hours old as at twelve years, 
and could reason as well at thirty clays as at thirty 
years. God does not create monsters, he creates men. 
I cannot say that in his popular teachings there are no 
errors. It seems to me very plain that he taught the 
existence of a devil ; that he ascribed evil qualities to 
God, wrath that would not sleep at the Day of Judg- 
ment ; that he believed in eternal torment. His predic- 
tion that the world would soon be destroyed, and that 
the Son of Man would come back in the clouds of heaven, 
and that this should take place during the life of men 



JESCJS OF NAZARETH. 321 

then living, was obviously a mistake. So with the prom- 
ise of temporal power to the twelve apostles. All this 
shows the limitations of the man. Men claim that Jesus 
had no error in his creed or his life, no defect in his 
character. Then of course he is not a man, but God 
himself, or a bare pipe on which God plays ; and in 
either case there was no virtue, no warning, no example 
in the man. And I think that Jesus would be the last 
man in the world ever to have claimed the exemption 
that is claimed for him by the clergy in all Christian 
lands. I know that what I say is a great heresy. 

The coming of such a man was of the greatest import- 
ance to mankind. He showed a higher type of manliness 
than the world had ever seen before, or men deemed 
possible. There was manly intellect joined with womanly 
conscience and affection and soul ; there was manhood 
and womanhood united into one great humanhood of 
character. Men were shut up in nationalities. He 
looked at humanity ; all men were as brothers. Men 
looked out at some old conception of a God, who once 
spoke on Sinai, and who said his last word years ago. 
He told them there was a living God, numbering the 
hairs of their head, loving the eighteen men whom 
the tower of Siloam slew, and just as ready to inspire the 
humblest fisherman by the Galilean lake as Moses. He 
found men undertaking to serve God by artificial rites 
and ceremonies, sacrifices, fast days, feast days ; and he 
bade them serve him by daily piety and morality ; and, 
if they could not find the way, he walked before and 
showed them, — and this was the greatest thing that 
could be done. 

I think that Jesus of Nazareth was greater than the 

Evangelists supposed him to be. They valued him for 

his miraculous birth and works, because he was the He- 
21 



322 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

brew Messiah. I do not believe his miraculous birth 
and works, I am sure he was not the Hebrew Messiah. 
I should not think him any better for being miraculously 
born; the common birth is good enough for mankind. I 
think the Christian churches greatly underrate Jesus. 
They make his death his great merit. To be willing to 
spend a few hours in dying for mankind, — what is that? 
We must all meet death ; if not to-day, some other day, 
and to spend a few hours in dying is a trifle any day ; 
for a few dollars a month, and a bit of bunting with 
stripes on it, you may hire men any day for that. But 
to be a man with such a character as that, possessed of 
such a masculine quantity of intellect, and of such a 
womanly quality, with such a feminine affection and soul, 
— I would rather be that than be a dozen Hebrew Mes- 
siahs wrought into one. To teach men that religion was 
piety and morality, and what belonged to them ; to tell 
them that religion was not for Saturday only, but for 
Sunday, Monday, and every day ; for the fireside and the 
wayside ; to live that religion, merciful to the merciless, 
hating sin with all his character, but loving the sinner 
with all his heart ; able as the ablest-minded, but shed- 
ding his sunlight on the dark places of the earth, — I 
would rather be such a man than a hundred incarnations 
of the Olympian Jove. Men vastly underrate the char- 
acter of Jesus in looking to make him a God. They 
have forgotten the mighty manhood which burned in 
that Galilean breast. 

This was the cause of his success : He was a great 
man, and of the highest kind of greatness ; not without 
faults, but the manliest of men ; not without errors in his 
doctrine, as it has been reported. He called men off 
from a dead Deity to a living God, from artificial sacra- 
ments to natural piety and morality. He preached nat- 



JESUS OF NAZAEETH. 323 

ural religion, gave men a new sight of humanity. It was 
too great for them. The first generation said he was a 
devil, and slew him ; the next said he was a God, and 
worshipped him. He was not a God, but a man showing 
us the way to God ; not saving us by his death, but lead- 
ing us by his life ; crucified between two other malefac- 
tors, as the Scripture tells, buried secretly at night, and 
now worshipped as God. 

Though almost two thousand years have passed by, 
Christendom has not yet got high enough to reverence 
the Galilean peasant who was our brother. We honor 
his death, but not his life ; look to him to save us in our 
sins, not to save us from them. Men call him " Master," 
and scorn his lesson; "Lord," and reject the religion 
which he taught, — to visit the fatherless and widows in 
their affliction, and to keep a life unspotted from the 
world. 

I look on Jesus as the highest product of the human 
race. I honor intellectual greatness ; I bencl my neck 
to Socrates, and Newton, and La Place, and Hegel, and 
Kant, and the vast minds of our own day. But what are 
they all, compared with this greatness of justice, great- 
ness of philanthropy, greatness of religion ? Why, they 
are as nothing ! I look on Jesus not only as a historical 
prophet, but as a prophetic foretelling. He shows what 
is in you and me, and only comes as the earliest flower 
of the spring comes, to tell us that summer is near at 
hand. Amid the Csesars, the Maximuses, the Herculeses, 
the Vishnus, the Buddhas, and the Jehovahs, who have 
been successively the objects of the earthly or heavenly 
worship of men, Jesus comes out as these fair flowers 
come in the wintry hour, tokens of a summer yet to come 
of tropic realms, where all this beauty blossoms all the 



324 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

year. I thank God for the history which Jesus is ! I 
thank him more for the prophecy which he is ! 



THE JESUS OP FACT AND THE CHRIST OF FANCY. 

The Jesus of Nazareth who sums up religion in piety 
and morality, and goes about healing the sick, who 
brings good tidings to the poor, who violates old rituals,, 
teaching men to have faith in the actual God, who is as 
much alive to-day as he ever was, and as ready to inspire 
men, — what a difference between him and the Christ of 
Fancy in the popular churches of Christendom ! There 
is not a great sect in the whole world where Jesus of 
Nazareth would be thought a great Christian ; not one 
where he would not be deemed the chiefest of infidels. 
How widely have the popular churches departed from 
the historic fact of Jesus ! Each sect and country has 
its Christ of Fancy. The Roman Christ of Fancy loves 
the Pope, and says, " Confess yourselves, hear mass, rev- 
ence the priest ! Do not read the Bible." The Protes- 
tant Christ of Fancy says, " Call no man master; all are 
brothers ! Search the Scriptures ! He that belie veth 
and is baptized shall be saved ; but he that believeth not 
shall be damned ! " The Russian Christ of Fancy blesses 
the Autocrat, bids him fight the Turk, &c. The French 
Christ of Fancy approves Napoleon, and bids the people 
give him their neck. The English Christ of Fancy 
establishes the Episcopal Church, upholds the nobility 
and gentry, and allows the people to perish. The Amer- 
ican Christ of Fancy is a kidnapper, and would " send 
back his mother " to slavery to preserve the Union. The 
politician's Christ of Fancy would have religion kept out 
of politics, lest it make men mad. 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 325 

What is the meaning of all this, — the honor which 
men seek to bestow on Christ ? Jesus of Nazareth was 
more than they think it possible for man to be ; and so 
they call him God. The miracles they tell about are 
only the flowers that bloom beside his pathway, the palm 
branches and garments men strew before him. Nay, he 
was more than they thought God could be, and so they 
made him God. 

What an encouragement is his character, his life, his 
honor amongst men ! His highest thought is still the 
prayer of the best, his life their model. The carpenter 
of Nazareth has routed all the Gods of Olympus, over- 
turned their temples, banished them from the earth. To 
the highest, conception of God men had, they have now 
added the gentleness and love of Christ, and so enriched 
their idea of God. But the same inspiration that filled 
his soul waits for you and me now. The same history 
with mankind is for us all, for every truth we teach shall 
pass into the world's life, our justice be incarnated into 
its institutions, and every noble thing we have got in 
advance of mankind shall be added to the popular con- 
ception of God, and our earth also shall ascend to 
heaven. The memory of Jesus is still with us ; his his- 
tory is the world's greatest encouragement. But where 
does he dwell? 

" Think ye, in these portentous times 

Of wrath, and hate, and wild distraction, 
Christ dwells within a church that rests 
A comfortable, cold abstraction 1 

He stands where earnest minds assert 

God's law against a creed dogmatic, 
And from dead symbols free the truth 

Of which they once were emblematic. 



326 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

He is where patriots pine in cells, 

To felons chained, or, faint and gory, 

Ascend the scaffold steps, to leave 
Their children's heritage of glory. 

He is where men of fire-touch' d lips 
Tell, to astonish'd congregations, 

The infamies that prop a crown, 
And paint in blood the wrongs of nations. 

He cries : * On, brethren, draw the sword, 
Loose the bold pen and tongue, unfearing, 

The weakness of our human flesh 
Is ransom'd by your persevering ! ' " 



THE MISSION OF JESUS. 



What did Jesus come for ? To seek and to save that 
which was lost, not to destroy it; and to lose his own 
life, not to save it. His great ability of intellect sepa- 
rated him from the sympathy of his age. The controlling 
men could no more understand him than an oyster 
could follow an eagle in his flight through the sky. His 
motives were beyond their comprehension. Men com- 
monly sought the society of the rich and great ; he that 
of the poor and lowly. They associated with the famous 
and respectable ; he was the friend of publicans and 
sinners. There were able men enough about Jerusalem, 
seeking for ease, honor, respectability, and money. I 
find no fault with them for that; they sought the best 
things they were acquainted with. He sought to serve 
and bless mankind. He asked his daily bread, no more ; 
no service, honor, fame, and would not be called Master, 
though he was the master of them all ; he would not be 
called good even. See what kind of persons he held up 
as models to mankind : the despised Samaritan, who 



JESUS OP NAZARETH. 327 

went out of his way to do good to a national enemy ; 
whom his nation hated, and did it after the man's own 
countrymen had passed by, and left him half dead ; the 
poor and hated publican, who dared not lift up his eyes 
to God, abashed with consciousness of sin in the sweet 
presence of the Father ; the poor widow, who stealthily 
dropped her two mites, saved by penurious self-denial, 
into the temple chest. These were the models he held 
up for the adoration of mankind, while Herod and Pilate 
passed by in pomp, and got the admiration of the people, 
and the high-priest stood there, arrayed in his costly 
robes, and was greeted with the applause of the multi- 
tude. See how he lived in daily contact with want and 
ignorance and lowness and sin ; but he saw want to 
relieve it, ignorance to teach, lowness to raise it up, sin 
to awaken the soul in the sinner's bosom, and elevate it 
to God. He went amongst men who seemed to think 
that God died in giving birth to the Old Testament, as 
men now think he died in giving birth to Christ and the 
New Testament. He told them of God, not a thousand 
years off; showed them his providence, not in killing 
Pharaoh in the Red Sea, and taking the Hebrews 
through, high and dry ; he appealed to facts, not fiction ; 
he showed God's providence in the grass blooming to- 
day, though feeding the oven to-morrow, in the lilies of 
the valley, taking no thought, but clad in more beauty 
than Solomon ; in the fowls of the air, the raven seeking 
his food afar, the sparrows, three of them sold for a 
penny, yet not one of them falling to the ground without 
the Father. They wanted faith ; and he not only had it, 
he showed it, he lived it, he was faith manifest in the 
flesh. 

Do you wonder such a man made enemies of the 
priests, the scribes and the Pharisees ? It was not pos- 



328 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

sible it should be otherwise. His greatness put their 
littleness to shame, his charity was their condemnation. 
Those awful words, " Woe unto you, scribes and Phari- 
sees ! " were not half so condemnatory as the parable of 
the Samaritan and the story of the Prodigal Son. They 
could understand his criticism ; it scorched and withered 
them up ; but his creation was keener still, though they 
comprehended it not. Men bred under a different ideal 
of religion could not see him as he was, more than a fly 
can see the State House. No wonder they hated and 
slew him. 

Do you wonder that he was loved ? He went out to 
seek the lost, — the poor, who had none to comfort ; the 
sick, who had nobody to heal them, except that great 
physician; the despised children of Abraham, who remem- 
bered the priests' and the Levites' hate, and paid for it 
with scorn and indignity and contempt. Do you wonder 
the people heard him gladly? I can understand how 
such a man looked on the sons and daughters of Abra- 
ham, poor, condemned, and self-condemned ; I can under- 
stand how he went and poured out his great human 
heart and his great human soul to them, in words that 
ran round like a river of fire, and they turned and blessed 
the man who spoke a human word to their hungry hu- 
man soul. Very likely there were men amongst them 
who had given up all hope of religion, who had no joy 
in the remembrance of the past, and no hope in the 
future ; men who despaired of man and had no faith in 
God. There are always such men. They are not bad, 
only sick men, and desperate. The churches cast out 
such men as infidels ; they ought to take them to their 
arms, and cheer, and comfort, and heal, and bless them. 
That is always a partial church which has not a corner 
in the chancel for such as call themselves infidels. I 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 329 

can understand how Christ spoke to such men ; how he 
solved their doubts, healed their wounds, and cured their 
griefs ; not by a special answer to every special ques- 
tion, — I do not believe even his wisdom could have 
given a satisfactory answer to every particular and 
troublesome doubt, — but by awaking a natural religious 
sentiment in the heart. I can understand how such men 
left every thing and followed him ; how on foot, and sore, 
tired, and hungry, they forgot their fainting and the 
famine in their mouth for the great plenteousness which 
so filled their soul. It is always a great day when a man 
of genius is born, a man of merely intellectual genius ; 
it is .a very great day when a man is born into the world 
with a genius for justice, for love, and for piety. If he 
can speak only to scholars, in a scholar's speech, it is a 
great thing, and the human race may well hold its 
Christmas festivals at such a birth. But when a man 
, comes armed with such a genius that he, with his single 
soul, can fill up all the space between highest God and 
humblest man, so that he can hear' with his own ears, 
and at first hand, the thoughts of God, and with his own 
mouth, and at first hand, tell them to the people, needing 
no mediator between him and God, on the one side, and 
between him and man, on the other side, — then you 
have a very rare soul, and mankind may well celebrate 
its Easter for that. And Jesus was such a one. He 
had the power of receiving truth from God, and the 
power of telling it, in a way and with an eloquence 
which was thunder and lightning to the people, such as 
the world had not seen before. It would be rather won- 
derful to see a man come now to seek and save the lost ; 
it would imply something more than great intellect, — 
an unconscious gift of conscience, affection, and the 
religious power. What was it to do this two thousand 



330 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

years ago ? Now we have Jesus for our model, and a 
hundred sects in all Christian lands, fired by his example; 
some believers in his theology, some disbelievers, from 
St. Augustine down to Robert Owen ; some believers in 
the theology of the times, some disbelievers, the believ- 
ers in real goodness towards men. 

I have always looked on Jesus as the greatest pattern 
of a man that the human race has produced ; but in 
nothing does his greatness appear so high as in the 
direction in which he goes to work. He turns to the 
needy, and seeks for the lost. Here was the greatest 
man God had raised up, engaged in the greatest and 
highest function a man can fill. Suppose such a man 
should come now, as much before the popular religion in 
our time as he was then before the popular religion in 
Jerusalem, — how would he be received ? Some think 
if such a man were to come, he would report himself at 
the Boston Association of Ministers, and be invited to 
stand in pulpits, and perhaps to deliver a " Thursday 
Lecture." I doubt that he would do any such thing. 
If so, I think he would shake the pulpits worse than last 
week's storm shook the steeples. I have some doubts 
whether the ministers of the nineteenth century would 
come off any better than the ministers of the first cen- 
tury did. I think he would turn his attention to the lost 
now as he did then; he would not have far to go to seek 
and find them. Here are the materially lost, fugitive 
slaves who do not own their own bodies, and are hunted 
by men who are members of churches, who take the 
sacrament in the church, in the name of Christ, on Sun- 
day, and the next day kidnap their brother men. He 
would care for these outcasts. He would raise the 
drunkard, the criminal, the poor, — men who never en- 
ter a church from year to year, and in a great city die 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 331 

and have no consolation, who know of no Redeemer, 
human or divine. How many thousand men and women 
there are who hear no word of religious instruction, 
religious rebuke, or religious comfort, who have only 
one act of religion, as it is commonly called, performed in 
their presence, and that is the burial-service read over 
their coffin-lids. I think Christ would have a word to 
say to and for all these men. I think there would be 
such a Sermon on the Mount as would make the ears of 
mankind tingle. Then there are men spiritually lost, 
and I think he would say a word to them. Thunder it 
might be, terrible at first, but like thunder, as cleansing 
to the sky ; not so like lightning, which shatters where 
it shines, as light, which cheers and revives what it falls 
upon. I think he would tell them of the falseness of 
their life, of the unsatisfactoriness of joys in which re- 
ligion had no part ; that Christian hypocrisy is a poor 
substitute for Christian religion before men, and poorer 
before God. I think he would show them that religion 
is natural, is human nature itself at its work ; that he 
would prove to them their need of it, and show them the 
means of supply. 

Well, Jesus, when he did come, came to seek and to 
save the lost. He had to pay for it with his life. Had 
he come to lose men, and not to find them, he might have 
had rank and fame, have been in the senate of King 
Herod, with plenty of money and honor. But now see 
the odds. Men could not understand him then ; but his 
idea went into a few minds, his example into more, and 
ten years had not passed by before there were men go- 
ing all over the world, seeking for what was lost ; and 
before a hundred years, in every great city of the 
heathen world there were Christians, whom his idea had 
inspired and his example had quickened into life. Now 



332 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

what a different world it is because he has done as he 
did ! Take that name out of the world, that great char- 
acter out of the world, and all its influence, and what 
should we be ? I speak within bounds when I say he 
has advanced the civilization of the world at least a 
thousand years. Yet we understand very little of his 
religion. We have talked so much of his divinity that 
we have forgotten his humanity. 

To-day is Easter Sunday, and all over the Christian 
world, save puritanical New England, it is a day of re- 
joicing. It is to the Catholic Christian the great festival 
of the Christian year. Men celebrate the resurrection 
of Jesus. To me all that is mythology ; yet I welcome 
the day which brings men to a consciousness of that 
great soul, and wish men could see what he came for, 
and how he did his work. This seeking to save the lost 
is the special thing which makes him so dear to mankind. 
If he had lived such a life as Herod did, do you suppose 
men would ever have told the story of his resurrection 
from the dead, and celebrated Easter Festival over that 
event ? No, they would have hated him the more if he 
had been raised from the dead. It was his character 
that made men believe he wrought miracles. It is this 
which makes his memory so precious to the world. 



THE STRENGTH OF JESUS. 



It is easy now to see the main features of this vast 
man, Jesus. He was uncommonly large-minded, with 
one of the best heads, it seems to me, that the good God 
ever sent ; more delicate however than big, more mar- 
vellous for the quality of his mind, its rare niceness, than 
for that great quantity which you see in Napoleon, Caesar, 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 333 

Aristotle, and Plato. He was great-hearted, too, with 
conscience true and sensitive, and a great deep religious 
soul. There lay his strength. It is not for his masterly 
intellect that I value him the most, nor do you, nor does 
the world ; but for his religiousness. And so we com- 
monly underrate the greatness of his intellect. It seems 
plain that he had that quick intuition which belongs em- 
inently to woman, but which is the attribute of every 
man of high genius ; and that great width of comprehen- 
sion which can generalize multiform principles Jo a uni- 
versal form of truth; and that perception which finds 
the beautiful in things homely, the sublime in things 
common, and the eternal in what is daily and transient. 
The man of genius has always the peculiar excellence 
of man's and woman's mind, is human, masculine and 
feminine too ; and in all history no great man has been 
so womanly as Jesus, maidenly and motherly both. 
Hence, on his masculine side, he has awful severity 
against a false theory, which makes wickedness and mis- 
ery, and builds dungeons for mankind. Hence, on his 
womanly side, he is so gentle and full of tenderness 
towards the man who holds, who administers, or who 
makes the wicked theory. He hates sin with manly de- 
testation ; the sinner he loves with woman's piety. He 
does not appear logical and philosophical, but acute, 
sharp-sighted, deep-seeing, full of persuasion, with a nat- 
ural eloquence ; not the elocution of the schools, but 
that spontaneous beauty of speech which belongs to a 
great conscience, heart, and soul, when furnished with 
great intellect, — understanding, reason, imagination. 
He was fierce as a tropic hurricane when he denounced, 
" Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees ! " How he 
thundered and lightened, a great earthquake of elo- 
quence, against the wickedness of his time ! What a 



334 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

typhoon of indignation he let fall on the man-stealers of 
that clay ! Some three years ago, when the City of Bos- 
ton kidnapped Thomas Simms, I read those awful pas- 
sages, which make my blood run cold ; in private I read 
them and in public too. It was a good gospel for that 
day, two thousand }^ears ago ; alas me ! it fitted our time 
as well. I hope never to read them again in public or 
in private. That was the masculine side of Jesus. No 
spring sun was milder, softer, or more tenderly kissed 
the first spring violets on the hillsides of West Eoxbury, 
than he was to the penitent and self-faithful soul. Great 
public sins he scourged and cauterized with actual light- 
ning ; there was no other way ; but the individual sinner 
he took into his motherly arms and pressed to his bosom, 
warmed him with his breath, cheered and comforted and 
blessed, and then laid him down tranquillized and beauti- 
fied and sanctified too, that he might sleep and wake 
with God. 



THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS A SOURCE OF STRENGTH. 

When such a man as this bowed his head on the cross, 
with his " My God ! why hast thou forsaken me ? " and 
at length with a triumphant, " Father, forgive them, for 
they know not what they do!" — it is very plain that 
death could not hold his doctrines bound, nor prevent 
his character from having a vast and permanent influ- 
ence on the world of men. He was cut off in his early 
manhood, long before great men reach the maturity of 
their intellect, conscience, and soul. He had just begun 
to open his plans. Yet considering all the circumstances 
of the age and the history of his people, I think him for- 
tunate in his death, not less than glorious in his life, — 
not without error of doctrine, probably not without de- 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 335 

fects of personal character and conduct. Take him as he 
was ; measure him by his own age, and then by other ages, 
by his nation's standard and his own, and then by the 
highest ideal of humanity, — and you look not only with 
admiration, but with deepest gratitude, with heartiest 
brotherly love, on this greatest, highest, purest of the 
world's great reformers of religion ; and you thank God, 
and take courage that you have strength to tread your 
own course, and are sustained and strengthened by the 
magnificence of his thoughts, the beauty of his life, and 
those dear beatitudes which, through all the storms of 
eighteen centuries of war and bloodshed, have come 
down to us, whispering their sweet accents of " Glory 
to God in the highest,. on earth peace, good will toward 
men ! " 



THE INTEGRITY OF JESUS. 



From the day when Jesus was nailed to the cross to 
this day, the whole human race has been blessed by the 
heroism which suffered, bled, and died there. What if 
he had known no higher law than the constitution which 
Moses taught, and the law which the scribes and the 
Pharisees set up in his name ? Where would we have 
been, and what would have been the condition of the 
world ? I suppose it is as easy for a man of great genius 
to be false to his integrity, as it is for you and me, — 
and of nothing is God so chary as men of great genius, 
— and if Jesus had refused his allegiance to the truth 
of God, what had the world been to-day? Surely a 
thousand years behind what it is now ; for from that clay 
to this, there has arisen no such great religious genius. 
Great men there have been, — I would not deny it, — 
but no man's head so towers into the sky ; no other man 



336 JESUS OF NAZARETH. 

ever sent out such streams of sympathy to men. To-day, 
how shall we most truly revere him ? As the other 
churches do ? No ! Not by stopping where he stopped, 
not by warping our spirit to suit his words ; but by hav- 
ing the same integrity of soul that he had, by being as 
faithful to our humble spirit as he was to his giant soul. 
He is not the Christian who says, " Lord ! Lord ! " and 
believes all the traditions writ here in this book in his 
name; but they are Christians who use their faculties as 
Christ used his, who reverence their own individuality 
of spirit, contented to think as they must, not as they 
will, those who keep a blameless fidelity to their own 
sense of right. In that way, my brothers, you and I, 
with our humble powers, shall continue the work which 
Christ begun, and in time the world itself will be a Chris- 
tian world, even in a higher sense than Jesus saw, and 
we shall be as welcome sons of God as this great soul 
Christ, and in his own time the Father shall lay his hand 
on our head with this benediction, " Come, and inherit 
the kingdom prepared for you." 



THE GOODNESS OF JESUS A PROPHECY OF FUTURE GOOD. 

This is Palm Sunday. Some eighteen hundred years 
ago to-day there rode into Jerusalem on an ass's foal a 
man who took this view of goodness which I take, and 
had its triumph too. Not only that, — he was himself 
the goodness which I poorly recommend; a man of large 
intellect, reason, and understanding too, but of immense 
goodness. Men dimly felt he was their king, commis- 
sioned to displace all false and unreal kings ; and so 
they saw in him the fulfilment of an old and doubtful 
prophecy. I see in him the fulfilment of more than that, 



JESUS OF NAZARETH. 337 

— the fulfilment of this yearning of the human heart, 
which, deceived by greatness, and trodden down by its 
power, still looks upward towards G-od, and asks for its 
Saviour. I see in him the coming of that time when op- 
pression shall not always reign, but a brighter day shall 
begin ; when, having passed by the savage period when 
men worship the giant in body, we shall have passed by 
a period a little less savage when we reverence the 
great head, not the great arm, and shall come to a time 
when men reverence a great conscience, heart, and soul, 
and the eminent men of the world, so deemed, who rise 
up to places of pre-eminence and power, shall be men 
like Jesus Christ, and the laws that they make and the 
example they set shall be the laws of God and the life 
of God on this earth. This time I know will come. 
Christ is the perpetual prophecy of it, and my own heart 
gives me an ideal prophecy. We need not wait for it. 
You can train your children so as to make it real. You 

can be that goodness yourselves. 
22 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 



THE INFINITE GOD. 



YOU and I must needs lament over sorrows that 
cross our several paths. When a ship is wrecked 
with fire, we cannot understand how so many lives 
should be destroyed by a single man, and we must needs 
mourn. We must lament at the sufferings of mortal 
men. But as soon as we remember that the infinite lov- 
ing-kindness comes down to every little child, to every 
thin-winged fly that fastens itself upon the wall of a 
summer's day, we do not mourn as those without hope ; 
but as those that see through the gate of mortality the 
immortal beyond. Then your daily life, rich or poor, 
obscure or famous, will become more beautiful, its toils 
have meaning, its sufferings point to the future, where 
what here was discipline shall be delight. Sorrows are 
only the hither side of the world. Yonder it turns out 
its silver lining to the day, and is radiant all over with 
rainbow beauties and descending peace ; in your con- 
sciousness there is serenity, there is trust, there is 
tranquillity, and a delight in God which nothing breaks 
and which nothing can even mar. 

My friends, I am not telling you the poor day-dreams 
of an idle man. I am no mere sentimentalist ; I look the 

338 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 339 

ugliest facts of nature in the face ; the uglier the closer ; 
I never speak to you but I remember the crime and the 
heartlessness which predominate in this great commer- 
cial city ; I never cease to remember that my brothers 
are kidnappers, and that three millions of my fellow-crea- 
tures are the slaves of this wicked nation. I paint noth- 
ing in rose colors. God shall paint, not I. I am not al- 
together ignorant of human nature, as it is to be learned 
by the philosophic study of the essence of man, or as it 
slowly unfolds itself in the records of human history. I 
know men as they are to-day, in the house, and the shop, 
and the field. I am no bigot blindly attached to a tradi- 
tional creed, and bowing because my fathers bent their 
heads. I study the evolutions of religion, as the evolu- 
tions of science ; everywhere I find their trace, in a 
heathen as a Hebrew, in a Mahometan or Buddhist as 
in a Christian, asking only for the fact. I am no moon- 
light sentimentalist ; but by hardy toil, as well as a wise 
passiveness, I would feed my mind. And yet this is the 
sum of my story, the result of my philosophy, — that 
there is an Infinite God, perfectly powerful, with no lim- 
itation of power; perfectly wise, knowing every thing, 
the meanest and the vastest, at first as at the end ; per- 
fectly just, giving to every soul what is promised in its 
nature ; perfectly loving and perfectly holy. 

The worship of the Infinite God, the consciousness of 
his presence in our hearts, — that is the sublimest tri- 
umph, the dearest joy, the delightfulest of all human 
delights. Beginning here, it brightens and brightens 
like the dawn of the day, until it comes unto perfect 
brightness, and the face of the Father gleams on the fore- 
head of the son. 



340 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 



man's IDEA OF GOD. 



Every people has its idea of God, which is the result 
of its history and the measure of its civilization. With 
the wild man and the savage this idea is very rude. 
Then it becomes more elevated, then more. 

First, mere force contents man in his God ; then a lit- 
tle mind is added; then more mind yet ; then justice is 
put there, then love. Mankind continually revises its 
idea of God, because it has the feeling that God is per- 
fection, and as it develops the feeling into an idea, the 
new result must be added to the Divine Being. Suc- 
cessively does Israel leave behind him his gods for 
newer and better ones ; the Unitarian and Universalist 
leave behind the Trinity, that Cerberus of God, growl- 
ing forever round his endless hell of mankind, and fare 
on, asking for higher and higher ideas of God. I put it 
to you, individually, and I put it at this minute to Jew, 
Gentile, Christian, Mahometan, to all throughout man- 
kind, — will any thing content you less than the Infinite 
God, of perfect power, perfect wisdom, perfect justice, 
perfect love ? And in all the tongues of earth does man- 
kind answer, No ! Yea, with great groanings which 
cannot be uttered, the ten hundred millions of mankind 
cry out, " Show us the Father which satisfieth us ! Give 
us the infinite perfection of God! Sure of that, of all 
else are we likewise sure." To this high end the Bibles 
of all the nations have helped, writ in many a tongue ; 
the great philosophers have also helped mankind to an 
appreciation of the true idea of God, who is infinite 
power, wisdom, justice, love, and holiness, infinite cause 
and providence, Father and Mother to every worm, to 
every child, to Jesus who speaks the world's great truth, 
to Peter who denied him, to Iscariot who betrayed, and 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 341 

to those other Peters and Iscariots who still crucify him 
afresh and put him to open shame. 



KNOWLEDGE OF GOD. 



This soul of man connects him with the world which 
the eye hath not seen, to which there is no end, the 
world of God. At first man worships the divine only as 
force. But as he grows from babyhood to childhood, 
where now we are, we prize in God more than force ; 
we prize justice, holiness, love. We learn to know the 
Infinite God, telegraphing to us in all the high hours of 
mortal life ; we learn to hold communion with him, and 
from the boundless ocean of Divinity to fill our little 
cup with truth, with justice, love, and trust, and our little 
spirit runs over with the inspiration which God has 
poured therein. We learn to dwell conscious of the infi- 
nite Father and Mother of us all, his truth in our intel- 
lect, his justice in our conscience, his love in our heart, 
his holiness in our soul, his will our will, and our life in 
most intimate concord with the eternal life of the Infi- 
nite Father. Consciousness of his perfect providence 
strengthens our spirit, prepares us for daily work, for 
trial, for suffering ; we cross seas of trouble, this pillar 
of fire going before us in our darkness ; we march over 
wastes of sadness and affliction, this cloud over our head, 
and eternal promise before us, our shoes not worn, our 
raiment not waxed old upon us ; we smile in trouble, we 
are bold in danger, we are fearless in tribulation, and 
we are immortal in death. 



342 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

GOD MANIFEST IN ALL HIS WORKS. 

Three hundred years ago men said it was wicked to 
study this world ; almost all the clergy of Europe said 
so. To know God, said they, you must read the Scrip- 
tures ; — not those from our Father's hand, under our feet 
and over our heads, but only the Hebrew of the Old 
Testament and the Greek of the New. Now men find 
the handwriting of God in the flower that springs up in 
the sidewalk of the city, and that the Ten Command- 
ments are writ on every fibre of the human body, and 
that God's law is writ in the solar system, and in the 
swing of the pendulum in yonder monument, true to the 
higher law of God. See how the philosophy of man's 
nature is studied. With the same freedom that the nat- 
uralist drops his plummet into the shallows of the ocean, 
not fearing to expose the secrets of God hid in the deep, 
the metaphysician with reverent hand drops his plummet 
into the deeps of the human soul, with the same abso- 
lute confidence in God. So men study the history of 
man, pass through the gates of the Hebrew Eden, and 
find huge empires, with cities, and states, and arts, and 
arms, far before Moses. But the same blessed features 
of the Eternal Father do they find ; the same religion 
waits upon their footsteps, the same love sheds down its 
sunlight on saint and sinner. 



NO ABSOLUTE EVIL IN GOD OR HIS WORKS. 

Mankind will outgrow this belief, which has hitherto 
prevailed in the theologies of the world, that there is a 
devil outside of God, or a worser devil of malignity inside 
of him. As fast as we understand the material world, 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 343 

will God's wisdom, power, and goodness come forth. 
Then as we cultivate the nobler faculties in us, will all 
fear of God vanish. Then we shall see that the terrible 
evils which disturb the world — slavery, war, drunken- 
ness, the despot's oppression, the priest's hypocrisy — 
are only a part of the divine purpose, means for to-day, 
not ends forever; they are to the world of man what 
night and darkness and storm and earthquake are to the 
world of matter ; and this prate of hell is but the cry of 
a child, who shall one day grow up to manhood, and sing- 
lofty psalms with noble human voice. Then we shall 
find that the pain which we thought a mere tormentor, 
sent to vex us, was but a watch-dog which the Eternal 
Father set as sentinel by the cradle of his child, to keep 
watch over the desire of all nations. Then we shall see 
that death, which man once thought came from the dev- 
il's envy, is only birth out of the mortal into the immortal ; 
the earth for a time broods over the mortal body, laid in 
its material nest, and out of that egg the never-dying 
soul comes forth, a bird of paradise to fly along the gar- 
dens of heaven, and sing its psalms of praise and thanks- 
giving and delight, filled with that perfect love which 
casts out fear. 

Science prepares him for his task, and surveys the 
round world, noticing the inorganic and the organic and 
moving things therein, goes down under the bottom of 
the world, and there reads the hieroglyphic writing of 
God in the sand which for a million of years has never 
seen the light ; flies through the vast universe, and then 
comes rounding back with this everlasting testimony, 
which he has learned from the material world, — " Every- 
where have I found power immense, wisdom unbounded, 
law, a constant mode of operation, whereby this wisdom 
directs this power for a purpose ever good, never evil." 



344 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

And while he sings that psalm, for a sublimer search he 
goes down into the depths of human nature, and opens 
the ark of God's covenant in the innermost of human 
consciousness, and finds written, — "God is infinitely 
perfect, Perfect Power, Wisdom, Justice, and All-Em- 
bracing Love. He has made the universe from a perfect 
motive, for a perfect end, provided it with perfect means, 
and therein secured blessedness for every man." Then 
from the world of matter there seems to go up one glori- 
ous psalm, echoed from the flowers of earth, each blos- 
som and little berry ringing its chime, and from the stars 
of heaven each mighty orb re-echoes the psalm, — "Tell 
to man that Perfect Love shall cast out fear." 



god's law. 

Look beneath you ! With what magnificence of peace- 
ful order did the harvests of use, and beauty also, come 
out from the ground, all summer long ! They kept their 
law, and, year by year, the whole world of beasts and 
men is fed abundantly thereby. Look above you ! With 
what sublimity the moon walks through the sky, the 
stars keep their eternal order, the planets wheel with 
mathematic regularity, and the unorganized fragments of 
the solar system, the comets, with " tresses and trains of 
colder and feebler light," dance their parabolic courses 
along the sky, and never flirt their robes in wantonness 
against sun or moon or earth or star ! It is a natural 
law which " doth preserve the stars from wrong; " it is 
that by which "the most ancient heavens are fresh and 
strong." And do you think that self-conscious, self- 
directing man — with whom the continuous progressive 
development of his nature is the aim and end — can 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 345 

thrive without keeping that eternal law of right which 
God wrote in us for our rule of conduct, personal and 
social? 

Cowardice and Fear may say, " I must ! " Passion or 
Ambition, " I would ! " Caprice, " I will ! " But when 
Conscience says, " Thou should'st ! Thou ought'st ! V 
then say thou, man, woman, " I shall ! " and the stars 
in their courses will fight for you, and the eternal perfec- 
tion of God will be on your side. 



THE TRANSIENT AND THE ETERNAL. 

I know how men sometimes admire a human statute 
which violates the law of God, how they glorify the man 
who made it, while they forget the eternal right, written 
as those sparkling stars all over the sky, written in our 
own hearts. I know how they pass men by, and call 
them fanatics and infidels and traitors, who simply de- 
clare they will never violate God's law at the command 
of men. You see this in Congress, in the newspapers, 
and everywhere around you. So have I seen children, 
some of the larger growth, admire a sky-rocket. " How 
beautiful ! " they exclaim. " How high it shoots, and 
what a shower of golden rain it scatters down ! What a 
man he must have been who could have devised this ! 
Honor to the city which spends money for playthings in 
the sky ! " Meanwhile, far above the heads of the rocket- 
makers and admirers, there shone a fair and noiseless 
star. Millions of years had it been there, millions of 
years to come it will be there, " a thing of beauty and a 
joy forever." Far off on the perilous ocean the storm- 
tossed mariner, ignorant of his whereabouts, not having 
seen sun nor moon nor star for many days, on some 



346 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

gloomy night looks up to heaven, and through a rent in 
the clouds above him, the star is shining there serene 
and beautiful ; and seeing its welcome light, as dear to 
him as smile of wife or child, he knows thereby the spot 
he occupies in space, and, guided by this trusty messen- 
ger that cheers him home, comes safely bounding over 
the deep, and moors his star-conducted ship safe in her 
destined port. Meantime also the astronomer in his 
watch-tower, heedless of the fire-flies of man, over the 
puppet-show of powder in the sky, looks on that fair orb, 
a point unchanging in a world of flux, and learns to 
measure the slow and solemn vibration of this boundless 
system of suns and worlds and moons, knowing thereby 
our whereabouts in space, to what corner of the universe 
this globe and its kindred orbs are tending on. So amid 
all the jarring of parties, the noise of politicians, and the 
golden rain of expediency and compromise/ 4 ' duty exists, 
immutably survives," and shines continually though it 
" lowly lies," obedient to that " light that changes not in 
heaven." 

Many a politician bids us look only at the spangling 
rockets, all heedless of the constitution of the eternal 
God. Men admire him and applaud him, and he goes up 
likes his own rocket, and comes down like the stick. 
But still there shine the ever-living laws of God ; they 
hold on their way, altering not, forever still the same, to 
guide all men to peace and port, a fixed station in a 
world of flux, to show us the vibration of these human 
orbs, and teaching us our whereabouts in moral space, 
our thitherwards towards heaven or hell. 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 347 

THE JOT OF KEEPING GOD'S HIGHEE LAW. 

You know how preachers often speak of the joys of 
this life. I think they are apt to undervalue them. They 
make light of success, of riches, of comfort, of the joys 
of a happy home. I love these joys, and every day I 
thank my God by a constant cheerfulness for what of 
them I have received or won. I say I think these joys 
are undervalued : and yet they may be estimated too 
high. But the joys of goodness, of charity, of love to 
man, and love to God, that faith which never wavers, — 
no man ever exaggerated these, no man can; as no 
painter can ever portray the sparkle in a star, or paint 
the varied beauty of a rose, or the sweet fragrance im- 
bosomed in a lily's cup ; for the imagination of man can- 
not come up to the fact, and speech delays behind. All 
this joy comes to individuals from personal faithfulness to 
God's higher law. 

Nor is this quite all. Soon we must leave behind us 
all the things that we gather here. The honors will go 
back to such as gave them ; our gold and silver and 
houses and lands will belong to others, and we shall go 
out of the world with nothing but our manhood. Then 
of what avail will it be to us that we scorned God's 
higher law, and grew respectable, and won honors though 
we had nothing to attach them to ourselves ; but with a 
single breath death blew them all away, and scattered 
them over the world? What will it avail us to have 
passed for giants, when at the touch of death, the giant 
leaves his empty robes and the painted parchment of his 
reputation, and slinks out of earth with a soul no bigger 
than a baby's newly born ? At a theatre you shall see a 
man who in a play's brief hour, with tragic strut, fills out 
the part of some great duke or emperor ; but when the 



348 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

curtain falls, and the foot-lights, and the head-lights, and 
the side-lights are put out, the palace of pasteboard 
shoved aside, and the wardrobe thrown in a corner, the 
actor, jostled by the audience, forgetting his umbrella 
even, foots it towards his home, to be teased by his chil- 
dren, and scolded by his wife, and the next day dunned 
by his creditors. So is it with this poor man, who the 
night before seemed lord of all. So must it be with men 
who gain what others reckon greatness, by violation of 
God's higher law. 



RECOGNITION OF GOD AND TRUST IN HIS MEANS. 

The most beautiful and tender of all human emotions 
are connected with God. The strongest and the deep- 
est are those which directly join us with him, and bind 
us to him; for religion is the great gravitation of the 
soul of man for time and for eternity, holding us to the 
central point of all the universe. Other emotions which 
relate to things merely of time and sense we love to 
associate with God, and thereby sanctify still further our 
daily work. We love, in times of sorrow, to anticipate 
the heavenly rainbow which the eternal sun will cast 
about the shoulders of each thunder-cloud, scarfing there- 
with the destroying arm. In the night of sorrow, when 
our eyes fail from looking upwards, not finding a single 
star in all the terror of the sky, we love to cast forward 
our thoughts to the morning which will scatter the dark- 
ness, and pour the purple light on all the hills. What is 
not immediately religious we love to make so by impli- 
cation. So the thoughtful man is glad to anticipate his 
daily toil with a prayer, full of eternity, and to round off 
his work with a twilight psalm of thankfulness and 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 349 

praise, making the work that is to be done, and that 
which is already finished, like a sacrament. Conscious- 
ness of God runs through all a good man's life, like the 
Nile through Egypt, making a garden on either side, cre- 
ating bread and beauty wherever its waters fall to rest. 
The net of humanity, full of all manner of toils and cares 
and weepings and joys, is knit by the four corners, and 
let down from heaven, and the voice of God tells us, 
" Call not thou common that which God hath cleansed." 
In nature God is all about us, a presence not to be 
put by, the moving of all motion, the living of all life, 
the loving spirit in all that loves, and the being of all 
things that are. A man naturally devout loves to connect 
God with all the material world. Even the rudest men 
who notice the power that is in the material universe, 
connect God with all that is sublime and awful. What 
makes them shudder and turn sick at heart, — the thun- 
der, the earthquake, and the storm, — to them is God's 
voice. But gentler and more refined men see God in 
the beautiful. The little grass is rooted in God, and 
every rose fills its cup brimful of Deity. He rounds and 
beautifies the spot on the wing of a butterfly, and decks 
each microscopic insect with brilliant loveliness, and 
gives the spider her curious art to spin and weave, and 
walk the waters dry-shod, with no pretending miracle. 
Philosophers well-bred love to associate God with all the 
works which we call nature. He is the great weaver, 
and nature is his living web, ever old, ever new, where 
static and dynamic forces put in the warp and woof; 
and from the various threads, mineral, vegetable, animal, 
human, he weaves up the most complex patterns, glitter- 
ing with chemic, botanic, vital, spiritual power. Every- 
where the philosophers meet God ; they find footprints 
of the Creator in the Old Red Sandstone, in each atom 



350 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

thereof; and in the chemic mysteries of a leaf or a grain 
of corn they find the wisdom of God, and in that won- 
derful power by which the fresh maiden beauty of to- 
day comes out of New England's cold ground, and makes 
summer loveliness all round the town. Astronomic Mr. 
Mitchell, at Nantucket, from his high tower turns his 
telescope to some far-off star, and as its flowery light 
crosses his eye, with pious reverence he wipes a tear 
away, thinking the far-off light is a whisper of, God that 
missed his ear, and now comes impinging on his eye. 
In times when no false theology intervenes between the 
philosopher's cultivated mind and the instinctive reli- 
gious sense in his soul, then he sees that the laws of 
heaven are only God's great geometry, and in the inter- 
secting lines in the section of an elephant's tooth he 
finds the same thought which God has made fossil in the 
stones beneath his feet. Then nature seems dearer to 
us when through it we see God. I can trust the finite 
universe when I know it all rests on the Infinite God, 
that the ocean rolls at his command, and by his unwaver- 
ing laws the summer poplar-leaves are twinkling all day 
in the light poured down from him. Then the all-absorb- 
ing ocean loses its cruel look, and all things instinct with 
life are instinct not less with God. 

Not less, but even more, do we love to associate God 
with man, and weave religion's golden thread through 
all the fabric of our daily life. So men delight to con- 
nect the Deity with the great forces of the nation. Say 
the Hebrew prophets, It was Jehovah who brought up 
Israel out of Egypt, and by his right hand led the 
people across the sea. " Remember his marvellous 
works that he hath done, his statutes and his judg- 
ments," says one of the greatest of poets. "As an eagle 
stirreth up her nest, fluttereth over her young, spread- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 351 

eth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her 
wings/' so the Lord brought up Israel out of Egypt, they 
say. You and I love to say it was the Lord who lifted 
our fathers across the untrodden sea, and planted a vine 
in the wilderness, watered and tended and trained it up. 
All nations feel this, and in manifold mythologic speech 
love to set forth the fact of God's universal providence, 
which they see not at large, folding all nations into one 
embrace of loving-kindness, but they see it each in its 
own special history, and no more. So all nations love 
to begin their great acts with some religious sign and 
symbol that they recognize only God as supreme. So 
of old time, when men founded a city, built a bridge, 
pitched a camp, it was a voluntary sacrifice, their choic- 
est offering made in acknowledgment of God. Now on 
such occasions, it is a psalm, a hymn, or some spoken 
word of prayer by which God is acknowledged. 

Not less does the individual man love to connect 
religion with his common life in all its greatest acts. 
All the world over marriage is a sacrament, a religious 
act, and connubial love is but a fragment of the soul's 
great love of God, and when that fresh jewel glitters on 
the bride's and bridegroom's heart, they love to look to 
that rock whence the splendid particle was broken off. 
At the birth of a baby, with a religious thought, father 
and mother take the nursling in their arms, and look in 
the newly opened eyes, and give the child their benedic- 
tion and a name ; and when you and I shall receive the 
heavenly birth, with religious emotion men will take up 
our cold clay and lay it in its last cradle, which then 
shall hold nothing but the flesh, and their thought shall . 
follow our ascending soul. Birth, marriage, death, are 
all marked by religion, each a sacrament. Men love to 
have it so. It is not the craft of priests alone, it is great 



352 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

Nature working at our heart. The stream of religion 
comes clown from the tall mountains of humanity, fed 
from the virgin snows which the Infinite God places 
thereon, and it runs journeying thence through all the 
plains of mortal life to the far-off ocean of eternity. We 
set up our little mills thereby, and it turns the wheel of 
the priest, but he makes not the stream more than the 
miller makes the Merrimack, or the sailor the ocean he 
traverses. So in all our life we love to look up, and 
reverence, and trust. The deep of humanity in us calls 
to the deep of divinity in God. We love to lie low in 
his hand, and trust ; it is a calm and holy joy. We 
want something secure. How transient and movable 
are the waters ! We drop our anchor down till it touches 
the bottom, and we have holding ground in God, and 
feel safe. Thou, Lord, art eternal, our fathers' resting- 
place and our God. In our joy it is more joyous to 
remember the deep well of Deity whence we have filled 
our little cup ; when our household doves are drinking 
from the brim, we love to remember that the water was 
itself rained down from heaven, and is God's cup of com- 
munion with mankind. And when we are washed away 
by some great sorrow, and in our distress we are bowed 
together, and in nowise able to lift ourselves up, we 
still love to remember that the stream which bears us is 
the river of God, and will one day carry us through the 
gates of heaven. There are times of grief for public 
calamity, which make us shudder and grow sick at heart, 
when we go stooping and feeble, with failing eyes and 
trembling heart, and it is great comfort then to look up 
and trust in God. 

I know not how men live without this. In the heyday 
of joy the shallow man may be content, and when the 
nation mourns he may sit down and eat and drink and 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 353 

make merry, heedless of the ruin wrought about him, 
perhaps by his own hand. But even then, to the shal- 
lowest of men there will come a day when eating does 
not satisfy, and drinking does not fill the man, and when 
his mean soul turns in upon himself and finds no comfort 
save in his God. 

It is a great thing therefore to know that there is a 
power and a wisdom which guides us and the world, 
stilling the noise of the waves and the tumult of the 
people ; to feel that there is a justice immense, immeas- 
urable, irresistible, which sways the ocean of human 
forces, and whereof we recognize the tidal pulsations in 
our private heart ; and to trust the love unbounded in 
its power, more than motherly in its quality, to rely 
thereon, to be sure thereof, to be satisfied therewith. 
When evil men rule on earth, and violent are exalted, 
when the wicked walk on every side, when noble men 
are cloven down, then it is sweet to remember the Holy 
One who foresaw it all, and knows there is a morning 
which is to come out of all this darkness and shame it 
iuto clay. Let me know there is an Infinite Cause which 
makes the world aright, an Infinite Providence which 
rules the world aright, — I will not fear what men can 
do to me; troubled on every side, I am not distressed; 
perplexed, not in despair ; persecuted, not forsaken ; 
cast down, not destroyed. Every earnest man feels this, 
and to come to this is a great step forward. 

This consciousness of trust in God is not only a 
strength and defence, it is a source of deep and sweet 
delight; nay, it is so delightful that contemplative and 
dreamy men have loved to let themselves down into the 
depths of this tranquillity, and rejoice in the Lord, when 
there seemed nothing else left to rejoice in. In pleasant 
days they kept abroad ; but when the public weather 

23 



354 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

became harsh, and rough, and stern, the stormier things 
were without, the farther they withdrew within. So 
when the skies are fair, and the tropic ocean waves are 
still as the mirror wherein some maiden knows the 
beauty of her face, the paper nautilus swims on the sur- 
face of the summer sea, and fears not while the 

" Little breezes dusk and shiver " 

around her handsome shell. But when the clouds darken 
in the sky, and tempests lower, and the winds begin to 
roar, and the waves to swell, she sinks without a mur- 
mur to the deep, thence to a deeper deep, where all is 
calm and still, and so her frail shell survives the storm 
that rends the ocean's breast above. Many a religious 
book has been written by such men, full of sweetness 
and piety, and running over with trust. Such are the 
works of William Law, Saint Bridget, Saint Theresa, 
Madame Guy on, Fenelon, and many more. Once in my 
early boyhood's days they were a deep delight to me, and 
when the little ocean of my private world was vexed 
with storms, I too could sink down to this calm, blessed 
water, and pray, and dream, and rest in God. There 
are many such. Sick, they wait for the Good Physician 
to come and heal them ; penitent prodigals, they fold 
their arms and wait for the Father to come to them; 
impotent folk, they wait for the angel to trouble Bethes- 
da's pool, and dip their passive forms into its waters, 
and heal them of their hurt. This is a form of trust in 
God which Christian churches love to preach, — this 
idle, passive trust, lying in God's hand, or man's, and 
asking God to do our work, waiting for God's providence 
to do without us. So in Mahometan countries the plague 
comes into a city, Bagdad, Damascus, Constantinople ; 
the authorities are all still, it is the will of God, say they; 



MAN IN HIS KELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 355 

the people are all still, it is the will of God ; the priests 
only pray, " God's will be done ! His purposes are 
right/' — and the pestilence walks at noon-day, with none 
to bar the city gates. 

But a manly trust in God is much more than this girl- 
ish feeling. This is indeed trust in God's providence, in 
his purposes, confidence in his character as a perfect 
Creator and perfect Providence ; it is a certain acknowl- 
edgment that he, like a wise engineer, sets thing against 
thing, and makes a perfect machine out of all the uni- 
verse, which, each part doing its duty, shall bring about 
at last a perfect result as his ultimate end. It is a great 
step, I confess, to arrive at this, either brought to it by 
one synthetic act of instinctive religious consciousness, 
or by a long process of reasoning, deductive, inductive, 
transcendent. It is full of comfort when we have reached 
it. As a sentiment of faith in God, as a mere feeling of 
faith triumphant over every doubt and every fear, it is 
of great use. When suffering comes it enables a man to 
lay his head on the block, to spread his arms out for cru- 
cifixion ; it gives men courage to endure ; " God will re- 
pay us," they say. There is never in time of trouble any 
lack of that sort of courage, and of this trust in God. 
The Jews have made their name classic by this kind of 
fortitude; the early Christians abound in it; so do the 
Mahometans, so the early Quakers, and so the Puritans. 

But that is not all ; it is not half. Trust in God is 
trust in his purposes, no doubt; but likewise in the 
means which lead thereto, in the forces of men. The 
purposes are divine, are they ? No doubt of it. But the 
means are all human. Mahometanism spread by human 
art ; Hebrew faith by Hebrew courage and Hebrew toil 
went abroad ; and the faith of the Christians, who met 
together in a little upper room in Galilee, became the 



356 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

world's faith by human heads and human hands and hu- 
man life. God wrought no miracles. Prayer is an ex- 
cellent thing ; it is the preface to work, it is the preface 
to this great Bible ; it is not the Bible itself, it is not the 
work ; it is the grace before meat, it is not the food. I 
mean the verbal prayer. A man makes a prayer to God, 
which is a great effort of his soul ; it stirs him to his 
very depths, and out of that stirring there comes work. 
The celestial mechanism of the sky is wrought out of 
material things ; there is no thought but God's, no will 
but the Eternal's ; 



though 



" Nor real voice nor sound 
Amid the radiant orbs is found ; " 

" In reason's ear they all rejoice, 
And utter forth a glorious voice. 1 



That mechanism bears up the daily or nocturnal beauty 
of the heavens, but the heavens know it not; the sun is 
heedless matter, obedient, passive, not willing ; so is it 
with the botanic mechanism of the ground, green or blos- 
soming with all New England's vari-colored vegetable 
life. In heaven above, in earth beneath, all is heedless 
mechanism, not conscious life. These material things 
are only the basis whereon man, out of living stone, by 
his own work, is to build himself a temple to God. In 
this human mechanism every wheel is conscious and self- 
moved. We are instruments of God, but we are volun- 
tary workmen, not passive tools. The North Star, if it 
had consciousness, might be supposed to be content to 
be passive and merely trust the purposes of God. But 
you and I must trust also the means of God, and apply 
them to reach his end. These means are human, they 
are you and I, our powers to think, to will, to do. 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 357 

Now, trust in God demands that we apply God's 
means, in God's way, for God's ends. That is what we 
are here for. The farmer trusts in God, but he does not 
think God will fill his barn with summer hay, nor with 
autumn corn ; he trusts the means of God, ploughs well 
his land, toils with the sweat of his own brow and the 
labor of his oxen; he enriches the soil, culls out the 
nicest seeds, sows them with care, and all the summer 
long he daily tends the plants his skill has brought out 
of the ground. Does he trust God the less for the end, 
because he uses the means thereto ? No sailor thinks he 
can pray himself across the sea ; he wants a stout ship, 
compass, charts, the appliances of scientific skill. Does 
he trust God the less because he confides in the natural 
means which God provided to reach his end? It has 
been a great error of religious men to scorn the human 
means, while looking for the human end. They call ef- 
forts to achieve the end by human means " tempting 
Providence," " leaning on an arm of flesh." Ah me ! 
God gave us arms of flesh ; they are arms to lean on, to 
work with, the instruments of God's spirit. It is in vain 
to say that we trust God to avert any harm, and do noth- 
ing, to rely on prayer without any work. A prayer of 
that sort is only a puff of wind. I do not ask God to 
write a sermon for me, nor to select a hymn, nor to send 
a message to New York. He has put means in my 
power for these things; if I use not the means, it is be- 
cause I do not trust him. Here is a young man, poor in 
the material things of earth, which he longs for as a basis 
for a nobler purpose. Rich in genius, he wants educa- 
tion, the best the age can afford him. In the silence of 
his chamber, in some rude New-England town, he prays 
mightily to God, with sweaty brow and clasped hands, 
prays for culture, for means of growth ; and as he feeds 



358 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

his father's swine, or hews wood, or toils in the dusty 
field on long summer days, his prayers go up to God, — 
" Give me the culture that I want, which my heart hun- 
gers and thirsts for." He trusts in God, but assiduous 
toil must supply the means to go betwixt his prayer and 
the end he seeks ; no inspiration shall teach him mathe- 
matics, no angel comes down from heaven to unloose the 
bars wherewith poverty has bound his spirit up; no 
Michael nor Gabriel shall rend the sky and bring a single 
book to fill his lean satchel. He must be his own angel, 
must take the inspiration God offers to his genius, but 
which he gives only on condition of faithful work. If 
that youth has trust in God it is not an idle trust. 

The poor man had fallen among thieves. The priest 
went by on the other side ; the Levite looked on him 
and passed on ; and I doubt not both of them, when they 
got home, remembered him in their prayers, and hoped 
that God would take care of the poor man, and quietly 
laid their lazy heads on their pillows, thinking that God's 
providence required no human hand. But the good Sa- 
maritan used* God's means to accomplish God's end, put 
him on his own beast, bore him to an inn, gave the host 
his fee, and said, " Take care of him, and whatsoever 
thou spendest more, when I come again I will repay 
thee." Which of these three was not only neighbor to 
him that fell among thieves, but which had trust in God ? 
You and I wish this nation prosperous, peaceful, happy, 
and rich. We trust in God . that it will be so ; we de- 
plore its evils, and ask God to remove them. God will 
do no such thing. I should be sorry if he did. God will 
not turn out a bad 'officer from his place. He will not 
elect a good man to be president, or judge, or sheriff, or 
minister. He leaves it for us. If we want national 
prosperity, we must learn to keep the natural laws of 



MAN IN HIS EELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 359 

God, be faithful to the native sense of right, not false 
thereto ; our statutes must be just ; we must make a po- 
litical machine which shall secure to all their natural 
rights ; for rulers we must choose wise men, who rever- 
ence God and keep his commandments ; we must follow 
our rulers as far as their commandments are true and 
right, not a step farther. What is to become of our 
trust in God, if, when called upon, we tread God's laws 
under our feet? If we decide to use God's means for 
national success, then it will come, and we may leave lib- 
erty a priceless inheritance to our children. 

Ecclesiastical men have palsied the life of mankind, 
have bidden us wait for God. God waits for us, as 
means to establish the kingdom of heaven. 

How beautiful is the feeling of trust in God — confi- 
dence in his purposes, in his character. But when it be- 
comes an idea as well as a sentiment, and an act, how 
much more beautiful is it. It is not the bud or the 
grain, it is the full corn in the ear, the bread of nations. 
The paper nautilus is a beautiful thing, sailing the waters 
where "little breezes dusk and shiver" round its pretty 
shell, sinking to the water's deeper depths when the 
storm begins to rise ; but a great steamship that takes 
two thousand men within its oaken ribs and steers over 
the Atlantic, fearless of every storm, is a different thing 
from the nautilus. That is a trust in God which works, 
and is a seed and a life. 

I honor the piety of William Law, 

" Which nursed my childhood, and inform'd my youth," 

the piety of Madame Guyon, and Fenelon, and Bridget, 
and Theresa ; I reverence them all. But far more do I 
reverence the piety of Oliver Cromwell and his trust in 
God, which knew how to make use of human means to 



360 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

serve God's end. That was the piety of our fathers, 
that planted the vine that shelters our head and feeds 
our mouth. It was the piety of Paul, which delivered 
him out of the jaws of the lion. It was the piety of Je- 
sus, which said, " I am not alone, more than a legion of 
angels are with me," and " Father, forgive them, for they 
know not what they do.' 7 



DEPENDENCE UPON GOD. 

Every man who thinks at all feels the need of an as- 
sured support, something "that is positive, that is perma- 
nent, that is absolute, to rely upon. By our very nature 
we must depend and lean. How dependent we are ; not 
self-originated, not self-sustained, only self-directed in 
part, and in how small a part every one of us knows ; for 
probably if we could have had our will not one of us 
would have been in this house to-day. The great events 
of our lives are events which take place in spite of us, 
even more than in accordance with our will. Now, it is 
a great thing to know that the Cause which originates, 
which sustains, and in so large a measure directs, is infi- 
nitely powerful, wise, just, loving, and faithful to him- 
self. If I am sure of that, then I am safe ; I am sure of 
the end of all my life, and am sure that though to-mor- 
row may turn out just what I wish it should not turn 
out, the end will turn out vastly greater than I have ever 
dared to desire ; I am sure of the means to the end, sure 
that they are adequate to bring it about. 

There are times when men do not much feel the need 
of this absolute trust and reliance. In moments of joy 
some men never feel it. But with many men, even in 
their periods of highest success, there comes a dim fore- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 361 

feeling of the brittleness of their joy, and they must 
look through the glass of their delight, and see the per- 
ennial heaven beyond them, before they can be satisfied 
even with their momentary joy. With most men, their 
outward life is a tragedy. As I look on your faces from 
week to week, and see the emotions which come out as 
they are stirred by a sermon, I see that to almost every 
one of you beyond the age of girlhood, life has been a 
tragedy. Perhaps it is most so with the highest and ho- 
liest natures, for either their high powers lack develop- 
ment, or, gaining that, they lack human sympathy ; and 
in their case that is a terrible tragedy. Youth plays a 
magnificent and dreamy overture to the great opera of 
life. What a full orchestra of passions, hopes, imagina- 
tions, loves, the earthly and the celestial ! what a chorus 
of promises there is for the great drama of mortal life ! 
But anon there is disappointment, sickness, failure, and 
defeat ; the defeat of your purposes, sometimes the fail- 
ure of your principles. Then there is the loss of your 
friends ; the better part of you taken away, and you left, 
only half of yourself, to pursue the journey of your life 
alone. 

" The clouds that gather round the setting sun 
Do take a sober coloring from the eye 
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality." 

The overture of youth has presently gone by ; that or- 
chestra of earthly hopes and passions and loves has got 
stilled ; passion has throbbed itself to silence and sleep ; 
hope halts a great way this side of the fulfilment it pro- 
mised, and there are grim realities that meet us on the 
stage of mortal life that we never dreamed of or desired. 
Then the consciousness of the infinity of God is the 
most priceless joy in the heart. With that you know 
that all this change and disappointment was foreseen, 



362 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

was provided for, is part of the heavenly mechanism of 
life, that the Great Director of the world cast his parts 
wisely, knows how it will turn out. 



man's right to god's providence. 

The old theology which came from the savage or half- 
civilized period of man's history, thought to honor God 
by teaching that he was not love, only power, not law, 
but mere caprice, and so might consistently violate the 
higher instincts of his own nature, or of the creatures 
he had made, and doom man to eternal woe. It taught 
that God owed no duty to the world, that he was not 
amenable to man, to his own justice, or his own love, 
and man had no right to any thing from God. All was a 
favor, something thrust in by his grace, not given on 
man's claim. 

But it is not so. It is irreverent to think that God is 
this mere arbitrary will, this loveless, lawless force. I 
have a right to eternal salvation, on condition that I do 
the duties which my nature requires and makes possible 
for me to do. You all of you feel so, in spite of that old 
theology which fed us in our babyhood, and still colors 
all our bones with its own ghastly complexion. What 
meanness it is on our part to think that God made man 
so badly at the first, from a motive so selfish, and put 
salvation and ultimate welfare out of our reach, hard to 
be won, and doled out only as an alms to a miserable 
few ; that he demands only duty of man, and allows no 
claim to right. Suppose it should happen as the popular 
theology represents, and at the last day the worst of all 
mankind should be brought up for damnation, and stood 
at the head of the human column of wicked men, mill- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 363 

ions of millions strong, with an eternity of torment be- 
fore him, and the Judge should say, " Wickedest of sin- 
ners, what hast thou to offer as a reason why sentence 
of eternal woe should not be pronounced against you ? " 
And the meanest and wickedest of men might rise up 
and say, " Why hast thou made me thus ? At the begin- 
ning, before I was formed, before the earth was created, 
thou knewest every force that would be about me or 
within me, and here on the threshold of damnation do I 
upbraid thee, and demand salvation." The man would 
be right. Oh, my friends, it is the worst of blasphemy 
against the Almighty God which our theology teaches, 
in attributing to him these ghastly attributes. Instead 
of the All-beneficent, whose presence is fragrant in these 
flowers, and is beautiful above the clouds of heaven, it 
has given us a great ugly Devil, all mind to think, all 
power to smite, but no heart to love, no conscience to 
decree justice, no womanly arm to take the universe to 
himself, and warm it with his breath, and bless it with 
his never-ending love. Let us tread such a theology un- 
der our feet, and out of the heart God has given us let 
the fragrant piety of nature exhale as that of these flow- 
ers towards heaven. Doubt not that the natural, unalien- 
able right which we claim of God will be allowed. 
Doubt not that the divine duty will be abundantly dis- 
charged. What he requires of us is the performance of 
our duty, as it seems plain to us. If we hold up our 
little cup, be sure the Almighty will rain the beneficence 
of his heaven down into it. If we try to think, we shall 
have wisdom ; if we feel for justice, it will come to us ; 
if our hearts yearn for love, benevolence will come in ; 
and when we seek trust and faith in our Father, be 
sure he lets himself down into us, as dew comes to 
meadows newly mown, or snows in winter on the moun- 



364: MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

tains of our northern land. There need be no fear in 
this quarter. Depend upon it, the Judge of the earth 
will do right, and made us so that while we are doing 
what we think to be our duty, that will lead us to bound- 
less welfare here and infinite heaven hereafter. You 
and I do not know the details of his purpose, and still 
less do we know the special means thereunto, or the 
special function our means shall accomplish; but still we 
instinctively trust and look up with joy. The plan is 
his, ours is the daily work, with the details which con- 
science sets before us. This is the first of all rights, 
our unalienable right to the infinite providence of the 

perfect God. 

♦ 

GOD CARES FOR EACH AND ALL. 

A great general proposes for himself a certain object. 
He will secure that object, and cares very little for the 
character of the means he employs, excepting so far as 
they are instrumental for achieving his end. Napoleon 
desires to carry a certain castle, to capture a fortress. 
" It will cost ten thousand men/' he is told. " I will 
give ten thousand men," is the reply. He cares not. 
But the Infinite God must care for the means as well as 
the end ; for each individual man is an end of God's cre- 
ation and God's providence, as well as the whole human 
race ; and though the general in his finite power and 
grasp will sacrifice the individual for the sake of the 
whole, the great God can never do so. If he do, it must 
be from lack of power, wisdom, justice, love, or holiness, 
which the Infinite God cannot lack. Therefore the indi- 
vidual must be as carefully provided for as the whole 
mass of men. This follows from the infinite perfection 
of God. 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 365 

FAITH IN GOD. 

No doubt there is an element in the religion of each 
man which is common to all men. In times of domestic 
trouble, the family of conflicting sectarians — Trinita- 
rians, Unitarians, Baptists, Methodists, Universalists — 
all gather about the grave of some venerable father or 
mother, and their else discordant hearts are harmonized 
by the same religious word, which is wide as human 
life, and deep as human need, and high as human aspira- 
tions are when their fair and far-ascending flight em- 
braces, purifies, inspires, and blesses all. So in times of 
national trouble, when the great ark which contains the 
tables of political liberty is brought in peril of the Philis- 
tines, Catholic and Protestant, Greek and Jew, true 
believer and disbeliever — all wheel into line and form 
an army where their discordant feet keep time to the 
same martial notes, and their conflicting souls blend 
with one accord in the deep feeling of religious patriot- 
ism common to all. If the Catholic Church in America 
should become as threatening as it is in Italy, France, 
and Spain, the Protestant sects in the United States 
would find a national hymn we all could sing, and the 
great psalm of self-defensive Protestantism would unite 
Trinitarian and Unitarian, Salvationist and Damnationist, 
the worshipper of the Bible and the follower of human 
nature. But we do not often go down to this deep, 
wide ocean which cradles the great continents of human- 
ity ; rather do we dabble in those shallow waters which 
wash sectarian and partial shores ; and as unity of faith 
in God is the most centripetal of all attractions, so dis- 
cordant faith in God drives men asunder with most 
destructive force. Light and darkness can have com- 
munion ; they mingle every morning and night, and put 



366 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

a twilight circle of loveliness round either horizon, so 
that, as the world goes whirling through space, there is 
a rainbow ring of beauty which surrounds it from North 
to South, wherein this great world continually rolls. 
There may be communion of light and darkness ; spring 
and autumn are the mingling of heat and cold; but 
there is no communion between faith in the God of Love 
and faith in the Devil of Hate $■ these two are stark 
opposite. So I say that as unity of faith is the strong- 
est of centripetal forces, so discordance thereof is the 
strongest of repellent things. 



LOVE TO GOD. 



I love God as I can no other being, — father, mother, 
wife, child ; my love to him transcends them all. It is 
reverence, it is gratitude, it is adoration, it is trust ; my 
will melts into his, and the two are one. All selfishness 
is gone, and in the life of God within my consciousness 
do I find my own higher life. We have our special 
times for feeling this love, our several ways of express- 
ing it ; and unhappy is that man or woman who tattles 
thereof, foaming at the mouth in some noisy conference, 
as in a village dog barks to dog ; but blessed is he 
whose noiseless piety sweetens his daily toil, filling the 
house with the odor of that ointment ; thrice blessed 
when it comes out in the character of the men whose 
holy lives, glittering with good deeds, adorn the land 
they also serve and heal and bless. 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 367 

HARMONY BETWEEN MAN AND GOD. 

What an immense variety there is in forms of reli- 
gion ! What odds between the sensuous glitter, the 
splendid costliness, of the Catholic service in St. Peter's 
Cathedral at Rome to-day, and the bare devotion of the 
Quakers in some Friends 7 Meeting-House at New •Bed- 
ford or Philadelphia ! What a difference between the 
barbarous idolatry of the New-Zealanders, sacrificing a 
man before a clay image, and the Trinitarians of Boston 
consulting together, and with great self-denial agreeing 
to send some stalwart-minded and earnest man as mis- 
sionary to convert those New-Zealanders from their 
savage idolatry ! The odds between the flora of New 
Holland and New Hampshire is smaller than between 
their forms of religion. The elephant of the tropics 
differs from the sea-bear of the Aleutian Islands less 
than the religion of the African elephant-hunter diners 
from that of the Russian hunter who captures the sea- 
bear at Aliaska. Yet each worshipper is sincere, and 
these different forms of religion have grown out from 
the ground of humanity as the flora and fauna of the 
tropics and arctics come from the circumstances thereof. 

How fleeting are the forms of religion ! What a com- 
plex mythology had the Greeks two thousand years ago ! 
Now it is all gone. God and goddess, nymph and muse, 
have only left their handsome footsteps in the marble of 
Greece, or their breath in her literature. Nobody prays 
now to Pan; no sacrifice is offered to Pallas Athene. 
Olympian Zeus has but his monument in the graveyard 
of buried deities, not a worshipper in all the world. His 
last devotee was an English scholar who wanted to 
sacrifice to him a bull in a parlor in London, and he was 
carried to Bedlam. All these deities are fossils now; 



368 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

none thinks them live gods. The terrible deities which 
Roman Lucretius fought against with his sword of verse 
have fled, routed before him, driven beyond the flaming 
walls of the universe whereof he suDg ; not a god of 
them is left. Curious is it to see to-day in Rome itself 
the temples of Ceres, Jupiter, Mars, Minerva, and think 
of the gods whom humanity has banished thence, the 
stone outlasting the deity. You look on the statues 
there, corpses of gods which once millions of men wor- 
shipped ; now there is none so poor to do them rever- 
ence. A new crop of religions has come up on earth 
and overgrown the old, and crowded them out. Within 
seventeen hundred years Christianity has driven away 
the old religion from three-quarters of Europe. The 
Christ of the Church has put all the Celtic, Slavonic, 
and Teutonic deities to open shame. But that form of 
Christianity in which our fathers worshipped in the Ger- 
man woods has itself been driven off by another form 
of Christianity which differs from its predecessor not 
less widely than that differed from the religion which it 
displaced. Once Teutonic Arminius met Roman Varus 
with his legions, and slew them on the old red ground 
of North Germany. Fifteen hundred years later, Teu- 
tonic Luther met Roman Leo with his legions of priests, 
and put them down on that same old red ground of 
North Germany. The difference between the Teutonic 
Heathenism of the Germans in the eighth century and 
the Roman Christianity which displaced it, is far less 
than the odds between that Roman Christianity and the 
religion which brings us together to-day. 

The name Religion includes the pious consciousness 
of the six great world-sects, — Brahmins, Hebrews, Ro- 
mans, Buddhists, Christians, and Mahometans, with all 
the ruder forms. The term Christianity embraces a 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 369 

great variety of ideas and forms, quite hostile to each 
other. 

Look deep, and you. find something permanent in all 
these fleeting forms of religion, an element of unity 
common to each, amid diversities so great. All the re- 
ligions that are or have been unite in this : They aim 
to establish harmony between God and man. That con- 
scious desire is the point common to all. In all the 
ruder forms men seek this harmony by an attempt to 
alter the disposition of God, to make him conform to us, 
not us to him. Such is the aim of all sacrifice, — to 
affect the Deity, not the worshipper. All the Old-Testa- 
ment sacrifices and ritual observances are to please 
God. Circumcision did not increase the piety or mor* 
ality of parent or child ; it was only designed to alter 
the disposition of Jehovah. This rude notion still pre- 
vails in Christian churches. There you will be told 
that all the sermons are for God's sake. The Catholic 
priest tells us we must please God. The Protestant 
minister commonly thinks that by his prayer he shall 
influence the Eternal God. He does not seek to lift up 
himself and such as pray with him, but only to alter the 
mind of God ; not to make men divine, but God human. 
Nay, for seventeen hundred years this has been the 
chief doctrine of all Christendom, that Jesus came on 
earth, lived and died, not to teach humanity to men, but 
to persuade God to mercy ; not to make us love each 
other, or to love God, but to make God love us ; for this 
surely has been the doctrine of the Christian Church, 
that his death, as an atonement, was the great thing, not 
his life of virtue and his words of such strength and 
beauty. 

But when we get enlightened, we find that the way to 
attain harmony with God is by conforming ourselves to 

24 



370 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

him, not by seeking to conform him to us. By and by 
we find that there is a God of infinite perfection in 
power, wisdom, justice, love, and holiness ; and then we 
find that God needs no instruction, for he is all-wise, and 
before the beginning of creation he knew all which 
would happen in the history of the human race, in the 
life of you and me, every act, every word, every feeling, 
and provided for it beforehand. He needs no appeasing 
to alter his affection, for he is all love, and has an infinite 
desire to confer the highest possible or conceivable 
blessing on the whole human race, and on each individ- 
ual thereof. 

When we come to this conclusion, we take pains to 
bring ourselves into harmony with God. All sacrifice 
disappears, all mutilation of the flesh or spirit, all cere- 
monies which do not grow out of the natural wants of 
mankind. 

Then comes the worship of God in spirit and in truth, 
not in one place only, but in all ; not on the Sabbath or 
new-moon days, but all time is holy, all life is religion, a 
continual attempt at conformity with God. It is only by 
this worship in spirit and in truth, in all time and in 
every place, that men establish a real harmony between 
man and God, and we become at one with him. It is 
only by this one religion that the grand aim of all reli- 
gion can be achieved. No words, no sacrifice, no cere- 
mony, no belief, can instruct, appease, or persuade the 
Infinite God in the very least degree. Nothing can alter 
him. 

In all civilized religion, there are finger-posts pointing 
to this desire of all nations, — complete rest in God, the 
perfect love which casts out fear. What longings for it 
are there in the Old Testament and Apocrypha ! How 
many a noble soul felt the poverty of ceremonial reli- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 371 

gion, and broke out into grand lyrics and psalms ! u Bring 
no more vain oblations. Incense is an abomination unto 
me I " — is the protest which Isaiah puts into the mouth 
of God. The prayer of David is, " Create in me a clean 
heart, God, and renew a right spirit within me!" 
" The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit. A broken 
and a contrite heart, God, thou wilt not despise ! " It 
was for this that believers built their temples and pyra- 
mids, and hewed out their statues, — ugly sphinxes in 
Egypt, handsome deities in artistic Greece. 

The atheist who smote the people's religion of fear, 
sought the same thing. He also longed for rest to his 
soul. In our own day a religious poet has mostly 
summed the matter up, — the effort of mankind to this 
end before Jesus, and the result of peace which comes 
from the worship in spirit and in truth. 

" Tranquillity ! — the sovereign aim wert thou 

In heathen schools of philosophic lore ; 

Heart-stricken by stern destiny of yore. 
The Tragic Muse thee served with thoughtful vow ; 
And what of hope Elysium could allow 

Was fondly seized by Sculpture, to restore 

Peace to the mourner. But when He who wore 
The crown of thorns around his bleeding brow 
Warm'd our sad being with celestial light, 

Then Arts, which still had drawn a softening grace 
From shadowy fountains of the Infinite, 

Communed with that Idea, face to face ; 
And move around it now as planets run, 
Each in its orbit round the central sun." 

The common forms of religion are not this worship in 
spirit and in truth, of which I speak. What delight 
there is, however, in this high worship which rests on 
the consciousness of the infinite perfection of God. I am 
sure of him, sure of his nature, his purpose, his motive, 
its end and means. I seek to conform my finite being to 



372 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

his infinite purpose, and so make a harmony between 
him and me. I catch the tune from God, as it sounds in 
the innermost of my consciousness, and then I. accord all 
the strings of my harp thereto, and sing the songs of 
Zion, counting no land strange to such music. Nowhere, 
not even by the waters of Babylon, shall I hang my harp 
on the willow, and sit down and weep in despair. 

All forms of religion have some truth in them, else 
they had not been ; even as all kinds of food have some 
little nutriment, and even for that men hold them fast. 
But this absolute religion, this worship in spirit and in 
truth, at all times, in every place, and with each faculty, 
— that is the only form of religion which has nothing to 
hinder the most complete and perfect human joy. Intel- 
lectually it is delight in the Mind of the universe, the 
Infinite Wisdom whence all truth and use and beauty 
flow. Morally it is joy in the Conscience of the world, 
whence comes the justice that sets metes and bounds to 
all, and is the world's great universal Will, overriding all 
individual human caprice. Affectionally it is delight in 
the Heart of the universe, whence comes this great 
motherly Love which fills the heavens with starry fire, 
and clothes the earth with such magnificence, and robes 
the lily in fairer raiment than imperial Solomon ever put 
on, and pours its tender mercy forth till the earth is filled 
with the odor of that ointment. Religiously it is joy in 
the Infinite God, Father to Moses, Jesus, to you and me, 
to the most oppressed slave that groans on a plantation 
in Alabama or Carolina; ay, to that slave's cruellest 
master, to the worst of murderers or kidnappers in our 
Northern States. 

In the sorrows of life, it is hope, resignation, and abso- 
lute trust ; ay, it is certain knowledge that the discipline 
of grief and disappointment leads to delight in our eter- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 373 

nal destination, an eternal weight of glory which nothing 
else can work out for us. 

The old forms of religion are passing away, and will be 
forgotten. They were the scaffolding whereon men went 
up and down, or the derricks wherewith they lifted up 
the precious stones they had quarried out, wherewith 
they were building up the great temple of the perfect 
religion, the worship of God in spirit and in truth. That 
springs from the nature of man, "and accords with the 
nature of God, and shall never pass away. 



THE FALSE IDEA OF INSPIRATION. 

The old ecclesiastical idea of inspiration, although not 
so powerful as once, still retards the progress of man- 
kind. It is an exceeding great wrong to begin with, for 
it makes us worship the Bible as a master, not use it as 
a servant to help. We are told that it contains the 
writings of men miraculously inspired ; that it is the 
truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we 
must accept its doctrines, not because they are true, but 
because they are Biblical. The Bible is not to be merely 
a quickener of men's thought, it is to be a substitute for 
thought ; not a staff that we are to walk by, but to be 
legs for us to walk upon. We can no longer come to the 
great fountain whence Esaias and Jesus drew their living 
water ; they drew the well dry and put the living water 
into Biblical troughs, whence we are to drink as we see 
fit. 

Now, looked on in this way, we fail to see the real 
value of the Bible itself. There are great truths in it, 
and in this way we may get those truths, and that is 
a great thing. But besides this, there are great charac- 



374 MAN IN HIS EELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

ters in the Bible ; and the character of a great man is 
worth much more than the special truths that he teaches. 
The philosophical conclusions of Aristotle, Socrates, Des- 
cartes, Kant, and Hegel, are not worth so much as the 
character of these men, the intellectual manhood which 
brought them to their conclusions. If Aristotle and 
Socrates lived now, they would not stop in the nine- 
teenth century after Christ where they stopped in the 
fourth century before him. To take the prophet's man- 
tle is a very good thing, no doubt, but to take the proph- 
et's spirit is very different, and a great deal greater and 
better, and more. Now, if you take the Bible as a mirac- 
ulous authority, the last standard of human appeal, then, 
though you get the truths that are taught in it, you do 
not get the character of the men who wrote it. The 
words of Moses, Esaias, Paul, Jesus, represent what these 
men came to in their day, not what the same men would 
come to in our time, starting from the higher platform 
with the greater impetus and momentum to start with. 
The character which carried Jesus so far before his age 
is more than the. special truths which he taught. What 
grand words in his beatitudes, in his parables oftentimes, 
in that last brave prayer of his, " Father, forgive them, 
for they know not what they do." Do you think that a 
man who went so high as that eighteen hundred years 
ago, would stop where he did if he lived in these days ? 
Do you think that Jesus, living at this day, would believe 
in the devil, in eternal torment, and speak about the 
wrath of God, and expect the world to end during the 
life of his immediate followers ? That he should have 
believed so then was perfectly natural, and we should 
not judge him as if he acted in the light of our times ; 
nor should we put ourselves into the darkness of his 
times. To do this is not to honor Jesus. I think it is to 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 375 

dishonor him. Then, too, if you think his character was 
wholly made for him, and not by him, was the work of 
God and not of the man, wrought out with no struggle, 
no tears, no fear, no mistakes, no sin, if his noble words 
were only miraculously inspired, — then Jesus is nothing 
of himself; he is the lightning-rod, not the power which 
lightens and thunders ; he is not a human fountain, only 
a cup full of the diviDe water, and God made the cup and 
filled it, and Jesus has no merit in being such a cup, 
none in being so filled. Some materialists of our day 
teach that a man's character is made for him, not by him, 
and he is the instrument of human and material circum- 
stances. If you apply that doctrine to the manliest man, 
and say that Jesus had nothing to do with making his 
character, it is the worst application of this materialistic 
theory which we all denounce. With the common view 
of inspiration, the highest man becomes only a poor pup- 
pet on the world's great stage, and moves just as God 
pulls the strings. Then the noble souls of the Bible are 
all dwarfed, and degenerate into little mean machines, 
and the goodly host of prophets, the glorious company 
of apostles, and the noble army of martyrs, are only 
wheels of the mill, and on the irresistible crank thereof 
the Almighty hand of God is laid, and turns it round, 
and the hammer rises and falls just as he will, and no 
more. What comfort is it to me to know that Jesus was 
faithful, if I know that God held him up so that he could 
not fall, when I am to be tempted, and there is no mirac- 
ulous help for me? Of what value is his example then? 
I wish to be wise, and men tell me that God shot down 
wisdom into Jesus, as he will not into me, and what com- 
fort to me is that ? 

Then, too, this notion turns the world into a base jug- 
gle. How mean it looks with no natural laws, no con- 



376 MAN IN HIS EELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

stant mode of operation ! What a world, where a man's 
word stops the sun for twenty-four hours, that a Hebrew 
soldier may slay his antagonists, who are not worse than 
himself! Look around at the world of nature as it is to- 
day, — every apple-tree on the cold hills of Massachu- 
setts fragrant with blossoms ! Look at the wheat hid 
under the snow all winter long, now through all the 
Northern States growing bread to feed not only indus- 
trious America, but belligerent Europe also ! Look at 
the spring grains which, Avith bounteous hand, the 
farmer but a week ago scattered over the soil, which his 
oxen had furrowed before him ! See the noble Indian 
corn just waiting to burst out of the earth, and pres- 
ently it will drink in God's light from above, and God's 
moisture from beneath, and get the solid substance of 
the ground wherewith to build up its exogenous stalk ! 
And then look on the world of miracles as it exists in 
theology, and how grand is the world of nature, and how 
mean and contemptible is the world of magic which 
theology tells us of! Now scientific men do not find 
magic anywhere ; but everywhere they see law, every- 
where order, everywhere exactness. They do not find 
any miraculous inspiration. Newton learns mathematics 
by mathematical thought, and Kant explores the more 
wonderful celestial mechanics of the human mind by 
hard toil. It is by labor, sweat, and watching, that men 
of science achieve their wonderful results. But in re- 
ligious matters it is said men get religious inspiration 
with no thought at all. And so to many men of science 
the whole business of religion is an imposture, and they 
turn off from it with scorn and loathing. Who is to be 
blamed for this ? In the name of God, men have taught 
what the science of the human mind must needs reject, 
and do you wonder that the most religious men of sci- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 377 

ence at this day are religious without a God? They can- 
not resist the religious instinct within thein, and they 
are religious without a God. They have got a here, 
but no hereafter ; an earth, but no heaven. 

This notion of miraculous inspiration keeps us from a 
knowledge of the great powers of human nature. It was 
once natural that men in a rude stage should have 
thought the best thoughts that came to them were shot 
down like lightning from on high, that they had nothing 
to do with it. But now we need not stop there. We 
make fools of ourselves by yielding our intellect to some 
priest, and stopping our reason because a man quotes, 
u Thus saith the Lord." These great truths in the 
Bible did not come by miracle, but by labor, and watch- 
ing, and prayer, and tears. The parables of Jesus did 
not come like lightning ; they came from the toil and 
prayer and daily endeavor of that manliest and noblest 
man. 

" Not from a vain or shallow thought 
His awful Jove young Phidias brought ; 
Out from the heart of nature rolled 
The burdens of the Bible old ; 
The litanies of nations came, 
Like the volcano's tongue of flame, 
Up from the burning core below, — 
The canticles of love and woe." 

This is the way in which inspiration comes. 



THE TKUE IDEA OP INSPIRATION. 

How can the finite mind communicate with the Infi- 
nite Mind, and receive inspiration from God ? 

We get the material power which we covet, not by 
entreating God to bestow it upon us, but by learning 



378 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

the mode of operation of the material forces of the world. 
We take what we can manage for onr special purposes, 
and slowly learn to use this power, and thereby get com- 
munications of material force from God, and share his 
power over the world of matter. It is small things that 
we take first, next greater, and at length, some thirty 
thousand years after creation, the philosophical mechanic 
makes the waters carry his boat or his great ship. The 
elastic element re-acts on the oars under his hand, and 
his little shallop glides smoothly along, or the wind fills 
his sails, and three hundred and forty-six miles in a day 
his ship traverses the sea. The same wind turns his 
mill at home. The river in its ascent is an inclined 
plane that reaches all the way from New Orleans to the 
Falls of St. Authony, and steam puts his ship up its slant- 
ing side, or lifts the cargo a thousand feet into the sky. 
In its descent the same river is another material force 
that will grind his corn, forge his iron, spin and weave 
•for him. The gravitation of the earth pulls all things to 
its centre, with swiftly accelerated speed. It draws 
down the sand through his hour-glass, or keeps yonder 
pendulum in its constant oscillating swing, all day long, 
all night through ; the earth's gravitation keeps time for 
little, feeble man. The earth and water smite with his 
tilt-hammer, and shape for him the stubborn iron, soft- 
ened by fire, into chains, anchors, axes, knives, and watch- 
springs, shaping it as he will. Fire carries him on land 
or sea, — his forgeman to stand, his porter to travel. 
He also makes the clouds his chariot, and walks on the 
wings of the wind. He controls the lightning, and 
makes the winds his angels, and the flames of fire his 
ministers. Thus man, who aspires to share the material 
power of God, gets his portion of it, and becomes a 
partner with him in the world, and so the might of God 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 379 

is imputed to man, and he is inspired with power. He 
gets it by normal work, and the amount he receives is in 
proportion to his original ability, to the quantity and 
quality of voluntary use made thereof. Aspiration alone 
is not enough. Aspiration with normal work, of head 
and hand, secures this communion with God. Man puts 
his thinking hand into the treasure chest of God's mate- 
rial power, and takes just what he has skill to use. By 
this process he becomes inspired with the material 
power which God put into the universe. Still he does 
not take it all. It stretches away before him and above 
him, vast treasures of power not yet made use of. There 
is always this reserved power, which man sees but can- 
not master, and beyond that yet other power, not mas- 
tered and not seen. Ever mankind goes on, ever aspir- 
ing for more, ever working for more, ever inspired with 
more. There is no other way for man to get the com- 
munication of this material force. It is on these inevit- 
able conditions that God grants it to man. 

Now it is in just the same way that we satisfy the 
next and higher aspiration, for the intellectual power 
that we covet so much. We think, or try to think, and 
so develop the mind in all its faculties. We study out- 
ward things about us to render them into thought. We 
study the world of matter for the science which lies 
within it, for the spiritual germ which God laid away in 
this material oyster. To the mere eye of sense the stars 
are dots of light ; to the thinking mind there is astro- 
nomic science hid in them ; they are a revelation, not of 
God's material power only, but of his power of thought 
also. The savage sees the wild flower, — 

" The primrose by the river's brim 
A yellow primrose is to him, 
And it is nothing more." 



380 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECT3. 

But to the thinking man the science of botany is in the 
primrose. To the senses, man is matter, living, moving, 
feeling ; to the mind he is a most curions array of physi- 
cal and metaphysical science. These outward things 
contain God's thought ; and as we study them we get 
communications with that thought, and are inspired with 
God's wisdom. Intellectual toil is the condition of intel- 
lectual inspiration. The whole visible universe is one 
medium of communication with God. So, too, man 
studies the history of mankind, or his own nature, and 
learns yet other thoughts of God, which become his 
thoughts, communicated from God to us on this condi- 
tion of intellectual toil, and by this medium of our own 
nature and history, and so we are inspired by God. 
Now just as men cultivate their mincl, scholastically or 
practically, so do they receive communication of God's 
thought, and are inspired with the intellectual power of 
God. Human nature is one medium of communication 
with God. So as the mind becomes cultivated we get 
new thoughts from him in two ways ; first from the 
things about us, and from things that have been and 
still are taking place ; and next from the nature within 
us. New ideas flash upon us, coming we know not how; 
they are the result of our mind's action, and are con- 
trolled by the constitution of our individual mind. The 
poet gets them poetically, the philosopher philosophi- 
cally, the practical man in the form of business ; because 
one cultivated his imagination, the other his reflective 
reason, and the other his practical understanding, each 
after its own kind. Now as each does this faithfully, he 
grows wiser and wiser, and has more intellectual power 
to get wisdom from within and without. So is it with 
the human race. Thus the civilized man has more intel- 
lectual power than the rude man thinks God possesses. 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 381 

Newton knew more about the heavens than Homer's 
god. Emanuel Kant understood the nature of man far 
better than any New-England savage supposed God 
understood it. Men acquire this communication of intel- 
lectual power in proportion to their quantity of intellect- 
ual nature, and the normal use they make thereof. The 
man of great genius is capable of more, the man of small 
genius of less. He that uses his tools well gets more, 
he less who uses them ill. " To him that hath shall be 
given, and he shall have abundance." Now we can 
receive the communication of intellectual power from 
God only on this sole condition of intellectual work. But 
men are so made that the human race continually ad- 
vances ; men are born with greater capacity for this 
intellectual power, then with better opportunities to 
develop, mature, and enjoy it. So from this twofold 
condition there is a continual increase of the intellectual 
power of mankind ; and we get more and more truth in 
all forms from God. All the circumstances which im- 
prove the powers of man help us to increase the intel- 
lectual ability of man, and receive more inspiration. 
Thus all schools, good books, and the like, help to 
develop the intellectual nature. These are the roads 
which the Holy Ghost travels. You do not hear that 
God inspires mathematical truths into men who never 
undertook to cipher. The new mathematical ideas come 
to men busy with mathematical thought. "Fulfil the 
condition, and have the recompense," is what God says 
to man. Still far away and above all, there stretches the 
infinite mind, the infinite wisdom, the perfect object of 
intellectual aspiration. The finite mind industriously 
holds up its little cup. The Infinite pours down from 
his fountain, and fills it full. When the oak-tree is a 
span long, and no more, it finds moisture and solid food 



382 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

just as it needs ; when the oak-tree is a hundred feet 
high, with great, broad arms, it still finds moisture and 
food enough. 

In the same way men get moral inspiration, and com- 
munication of God's justice. The normal use of man's 
moral faculties is the condition on which he gets it. As 
the richer harvests come from good seed sown in good 
soil, well tilled, so do we get richer returns of justice 
from the conscience which we nicely cultivate, and new 
moral ideas spring up in us, and we grow wiser in con- 
science. Here too the amount of moral inspiration is in 
proportion to the quantity of the man's nature and the 
normal use thereof. Here likewise is progress of the 
individual man, and of mankind, in the receipt of justice 
from God, and on the same condition. Continually, as 
men get civilized, men are born with better organiza- 
tion for justice, and furnished with better means for the 
development of the moral nature they are born with. 
Here too are mediums of communication. All the just 
and good men that ever lived, from Moses to the last 
writer of the New Testament, and from him to our day ; 
all the noble women that have ever been, the goodly 
company of prophets, the noble army of martyrs, — all 
these are mediums for receiving this moral inspiration 
from God, and giving it down to us. The House of 
Refuge for friendless girls, asylums for the unfortunate, 
legislatures which re-enact justice into laws, courts 
which execute humanity in their decrees, — all these are 
instruments which promote the communication of justice 
from the Most High God. Thus mankind advances con- 
tinually, and continually becomes more just, juster even 
than the old idea of God. The good father who teaches 
his child to obey conscience, to be kind to those who are 
unkind to him, is a higher being than the author of Gen- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 383 

esis supposed God to be. Miss Dix, who goes through 
the land caring for the unfortunate, prepares mankind 
to receive moral communication and inspiration from the 
Infinitely Just God. Still, go as high as we may, our 
ideal travels before us, a cloud by day and a fire by 
night, the infinite ideal of our moral aspiration ; and the 
more we gain, the more we want. As the oak-tree 
becomes larger it requires more light and moisture, and 
as we grow greater we ask more justice, and receive it 
still. 

It is in the same way that man goes on in his higher 
development, and receives affectional inspiration. 

All these come from the infinite Source of all things, 
and we get inspiration by the normal use of our faculties 
in their normal condition, not by their abnormal. Inspi- 
ration is not miracle, it is law ; it is not capriciousness, 
it is a constant force. Fulfil the conditions, and the 
inspiration comes. My friends, inspiration is a fact in 
human history, in your life and mine. You and I may 
have communion with God, have it constantly. The 
Infinite God is ultimate Source of all things. We go to 
that eternal fountain, and thence draw the waters of life 
in proportion to the size of our cup and our diligence in 
using it. The well is very deep, but it is brimful, and 
the man with the shortest arm and the smallest cup may 
dip therein and find abundance. As all trees root in 
the ground, and take hold of the air, so we all in God. 
There is only one kind of inspiration ; it is the income 
of God to our consciousness in its various modes, intel- 
lectual, moral, affectional, and religious. There are dif- 
ferent degrees of it ; Jesus had much, Paul less. The 
degree depends on us ; it does not depend on the ca- 
price and variableness of the Deity. There are high 
hours of visitation from the living God; we all know 



384 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

them in our ecstatic moments, when we are wrought 
into a great act of prayer. Then the mind is quick, the 
conscience quick, the affections travel wide ; we can 
forgive any sin, love the worst men, be kind to the vile ; 
then in idea we are perfectly holy, and what satisfies us 
in our common modes of consciousness we tread under 
foot. That is when we have got the highest degree of 
inspiration ; it is the result of our former life and the 
discipline of our faculties, for when we start at first we 
cannot come up to this. All faculties are mediums of 
communication, avenues of inspiration. God does not 
build a road from himself to us, and then refuse to travel 
on it. You and I may have inspiration of the same sort 
as came to Moses, to Esaias, " whose hallowed lips were 
touched with fire," and to Jesus. We all may be in- 
spired. When you are faithful to your own powers, 
you are not only receiving communication through them, 
but you are preparing yourself at the same time to 
receive yet more and more. There is a continual prog- 
ress of this inspiration for the individual and the race. 
It is unbounded. There is no limit to the supply in 
God ; there is no end to the capacity in mankind to 
receive it. Is any one of us so good, or wise, or loving, 
as he might be, ay, as he could be ? We shall receive 
this inspiration on the natural condition which belongs 
to our soul. Much material power is there in the world 
not yet converted to the world's use. The foodful 
ground will double its harvest any time when man 
spades it through with twice the thought that he does 
now. How many streams run down, waiting to be mills, 
factories, blacksmiths for mankind ! As yet we have 
used but a small part of the material power which God 
waits to communicate to us. So we have used but a 
very small fraction of the intellectual, moral, and affec- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 385 

tional power which is laid up, a great treasure of the 
highest strength in the nature of man. You and I can 
draw therefrom any day just what we will, and what we 
have the capacity to receive. Doing this, we shall pre- 
pare the way for better things to come. And where 
we painfully travel with prayers, and tears, and possibly 
with blood also, the human race may move smoothly 
onwards, passing over the road which our hands have 
levelled, and our feet have made easy for the world's 
progress ; and then other men will go further and fur- 
ther on. Another three centuries might make out of 
the intellectual, moral, and affectional treasures of hu- 
man nature in New England, what the last three centu- 
ries have made out of the material forces of this conti- 
nent. 



Like the devil in the New-Testament legend of the 
temptation, a false doctrine may offer mankind whole 
kingdoms of the earth, if he will fall down and worship 
it. It cannot convey an inch of soil and give a good 
title ; it is only a squatter for the night, and if a sover- 
eign in the darkness, when the morning dawns he is dis- 
lodged by the real owner and comes not back again. 



THE NORMAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE RELIGIOUS FACULTY. 

The religious faculty, connecting man consciously with 
the eternal world and its Divine Cause, is the greatest 
of all our spiritual talents, and as such has the most 
abiding power and far-controlling force. Its action may 
be of the most elevating or the most degrading tend- 
ency, accordingly as it works well or ill, with our nature 
or against it. No faculty of the body or spirit can so 

25 



386 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

debauch and brutalize man as this when misdirected or 
abused; the abuse of the religious talents wrought such 
havoc in the scribes and Pharisees, that Jesus of Naza- 
reth declared that publicans and harlots should enter into 
the kingdom of heaven sooner than they. 

But the normal development of the religious faculty 
has the most ennobling influence on the whole character ; 
nothing so strengthens and refines a man. In our pres- 
ent stage of civilization there are two truths which seem 
necessary to the development of this faculty, — the idea 
of immortal life for each person, and the idea of the infi- 
nite perfection of God. These are no doubt the grand- 
est, the highest, and most valuable ideas which mankind 
knows ; these are the two greatest lights in the heaven 
of human consciousness, to rule alike our day and night ; 
but as the sun and the moon, they are no monopoly of 
men of genius and great learning ; they are not conclu- 
sions wrought out by careful study, but facts given us in 
the nature of man, which we feel instinctively at first. 
This feeling of human immortality and God's perfection 
was lived as life, long before it was uttered by the phi- 
losopher or the p&et; and accordingly no truths are 
more widely welcomed throughout the world than these. 

With these ideas there may come forth a normal devel- 
opment of the religious faculty, according to its nature, 
and this marks the individual character with a fourfold 
excellence of tranquillity, energy, harmony, and beauty. 
It affords a composure and a rest which else we cannot 
attain to. We feel, we know the Infinite God, and re- 
pose not only in his being, but in the faculties of his 
being, in his perfect power, perfect wisdom, perfect jus- 
tice, perfect love, and perfect holiness. And we rely not 
only on the existence of these qualities in God, but on 
the product of these qualities, on his works, which are 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 387 

like his being. He is perfect Cause of all, creating all 
from a perfect motive, for a perfect purpose, as a perfect 
means. He is perfect Providence not less, and the 
power, wisdom, justice, and love, once active to create, 
continually act to preserve, develop, and bless. Thus 
knowing God, we know our own immortal life, and are 
conscious of that divine nature in us which shall never 
die, but unfold and grow into worlds of new excellence ; 
for our soul is only a seed, whose present power and 
growth we know, but not the forms of its future growth. 
Thus conscious of our immortality and God's perfection, 
we are full of trust; our absolute allegiance becomes ab- 
solute confidence ; we fear the end of nothing. How can 
we, if we are sure of God ? We know there is a Provi- 
dence which watches over us, works with us, for us, 
through us, tends us by day and by dark, protects our 
dear ones, our country, and all mankind ; that he desires 
the best of all possible things for each and all ; that he 
has the perfect justice to will the best, perfect wisdom 
to devise the best, and perfect power to achieve the 
best. What then can we fear? Is not God the Father 
and Mother of all? and if God is for us, who can be 
against us ? We are only to do what we know is our 
duty, and take what follows thence ; it is what God de- 
signed should follow thence. God asks no more of us, 
puts up with no less. We may succeed in life, our plans 
may prosper, health and happiness may attend us ; and 
then we have a rapture beyond all this, and God will make 
eternal welfare out of this transient success. Or we may 
fail in our pursuits, we may have to bear with sickness, 
poverty, loss of friends ; but we know that which we 
suffer here will be compensated at the end, that what 
is discipline to-day shall be delight hereafter. America 
may perish, as Naples, Athens, and Rome j Boston may 



388 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

go where Sodom and Gomorrah went, — still we are sure 
that the Infinite God will convert these seeming acci- 
dents to real good. Knowing this, I have composure, 
tranquillity ; I can be still ; I can face the racks of the 
Spanish Inquisition, or the cold, continuous sorrow of 
disappointed earthly life, and smile upon it all. All men 
do not know the value of this tranquillity ; but he who 
has been in doubt and fear, and then found rest for his 
soul, knows that no common joy is worth the very pains 
which precede this satisfaction. A man wanders in the 
doubts of science, and, still worse, in the fears of the 
popular theology, which is called Christianity, and he 
thence comes out to the clear light of natural religion, 
the warmth of piety in him, and the sun of God's infinite 
perfection about him, — and what a day it is he walks in, 
contrasted with the darkness he has just escaped from ! 
With this tranquillity there comes new energy. As 
soon as we have a certainty of God, and rest in his cau- 
sal providence, we have new confidence in our own fac- 
ulties ; no limb of the body then seems imperfect or in- 
significant ; no power of the spirit mean, — for as God 
made them as they are, we cannot complain ; we are sure 
they are adequate for his divine purpose, and also for 
the personal duty we are to achieve ; we shall use our 
faculties, great or little, with the strength God has given 
us. If our spiritual stature is small, and the crowd 
throng us, we know that God has planted some sycamore- 
tree for our little stature, into which we shall climb to 
see the great procession of heavenly things pass by. 
Every intellectual talent is greatened by the culture of 
the religious faculties. A man who has this religious de- 
velopment in any department of industry will do more 
work, with less confusion, than one devoid of it. " An 
undevout astronomer is mad," says a famous poet; he 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 389 

looks with but a fraction of his eye, he has cut off half 
his faculty. But an undevout blacksmith, carpenter, 
doctor, lawyer, is just as mad ; his arm is the weaker, and 
his faculty the less. One of the sources of greatness in 
Dr. Franklin was his religious trust, an entire rest in 
God, and tranquillity of soul, which went so far beyond 
the priesthood of his times that they called him infidel, — 
who had flown on spiritual wings far beyond the seeing 
of their eyes. The weakness which we see in so many 
able-minded men in America to-day, is owing to the fact 
that they tie up the right arm of human strength, and 
put out the right eye of human light, — and what wonder 
that they go impotent and blind, and stumble by the 
way ? Then how much clearer is the conscience, with 
what greater certainty does it perceive the rule of right, 
when it knows and has a general trust in Him who is the 
right. How much stronger too is the will to adhere to 
it. All history shows that nothing so confirms the will 
of man as the religious faculty ; the saints and martyrs 
of all lands and of every age are a witness of it. The 
power of love acquires also a similar increase of strength ; 
the affectional feelings are nicer, the quality of love 
more delicate, the quantity greater. Our love for those 
nearest and dearest to us is strengthened, and it expands 
to a wider circle ; we love our country more, and can 
bear more for it; nay, our love embraces all mankind, 
without distinction of tongue or nation. Religion is the 
deepest incentive to world-wide philanthropy, and at last 
we come to love even the wickedest of men, — those 
who produce or encourage the crime and the misery 
which we seek to abolish. 

With this energy of each faculty there comes a har- 
mony of all ; the various talents work well together, and 
there is a certain equilibrium between the body and 



390 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

spirit. The instinctive passion of youth gives way to 
the counsels of the spirit, and the ambitious calculations 
of manhood only quicken, not corrupt, the mind, con- 
science, and heart. Nothing so harmonizes the various 
talents of a man as well-proportioned religious culture, 
for it not only allows the natural rights of body and 
spirit, but demands them. Strong will and strong con- 
science are enough to make a martyr, — often a most in- 
congruous character, — but it is only this harmony of 
all the powers that makes the saint, whose duty is de- 
light, who is happy while he bears the cross, whose en- 
ergy of work is rounded off at last with the sweet tran- 
quillity of rest. 

Then as the crowning grace of this fourfold excel- 
lence, there comes what we may call the beauty of the 
spirit ; for as there is a certain handsomeness of the out- 
ward person, a completeness of the whole, and the per- 
fection of each part, which is the union of health and 
strength, that draws the eyes of all beholders, and com- 
pels the admiring reverence of whoso sees, — so there is 
likewise a beauty of man's spirit, the completion of the 
whole and perfection of each part, a union of spiritual 
strength and health, which yet more intimately draws 
the eyes of the heavenly-minded, and compels the ad- 
miring reverence of every holy soul. There is as much 
difference in the beauty of spirits as of bodies. Covet- 
ousness, hate, lies, fraud, uncleanness of lust, selfishness, 
irreverence, bigotry, revenge, superstition, fanaticism, 
fear, — these are the ugliness of the inner man, and no cor- 
poreal obliquity of limb or feature can ever compare with 
the ghastliness of this inner deformity. But temperance, 
wisdom, courage, charity, reverence, trust, integrity, 
holiness, the aspiring virtue of the finite, — these are the 
beauty of the inner man, the altogether beautiful of the 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 391 

human soul, and this the well-proportioned culture of the 
religious faculty is sure to bring ; and the harmony, en- 
ergy, and tranquillity, which are the special colors that 
complexion the soul's excellence, will all blend into one 
threefold arch of heavenly beauty, a rainbow of hope 
and promise, spanning our human world. All men do 
homage to the highest form of material beauty, and the 
sculptor and painter copy its loveliness and immor- 
talize it in their work, and men worship it as a thing 
divine. But, what is this mere beauty of the evanescent 
flesh compared to that transcendent and eternal loveli- 
ness of the soul which dwells within the human frame ? 

What homage do men pay to the beauty of the intel- 
lect, reverencing that precious jewel in the homely head 
of Socrates ! Above all the bravery of the body they 
count the piety of Jesus, reckoning and honoring his 
manly virtue as the eternally beautiful of the human 
soul, whereunto churches and cathedrals all round the 
world are builded up, as not unfitting monuments. 

I admire the men of great intellectual grandeur, the 
inventors who create thought, the organizers who make 
it a thing, and the administrators who run the material or 
human mills with it. I greatly reverence such as greatly 
mix their thought with brute material things, and so con- 
vert water, wood, metals, earth, fire, lightning, into the 
form of man, to do his human work ; those too who or- 
ganize humanity itself into lovelier shapes, till the nation- 
al lump is leavened with a great idea, and rises into a 
well-proportioned state. None reverence more than I 
the poet's great imagination or the philosopher's great 
reason. But to me the most cheering specimens of man- 
kind are not these men of great intellect ; I pass by 
Cromwell, Napoleon, Caesar, Hannibal, and Alexander ; I 
leave Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, and Homer ; I fly over 



392 MAN IN HIS EELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

Kant, Newton, Leibnitz, Bacon, Descartes, Aristotle, 
Socrates, and others of that kin, born lords of reason, of 
most illustrious birth, or on the common level of ordinary 
life, — and I pause before some man or woman of com- 
mon intellect, but well-developed religious faculty, and 
there I bow me down more joyous than to the great of 
earth. Here are the beatitudes of our humanity, the 
just conscience, the loving and self-denying heart, the 
soul that trusts God with lowly and aspiring reverence. 
Here I find the proudest triumphs of mankind, and, going 
out from many an humble house, where dwells some man 
or woman of surpassing purity, cleanness of eyes, and 
delicacy of religious love, I say, " God created man in 
his own image," I clasp my hands with thanksgiving and 
say, " In the image and likeness of God createdst thou 
him, but a little lower than the angels, and here thereof 
is the proof." 

By the well-proportioned culture of the religious fac- 
ulty we gain this tranquillity, energy, harmony, beauty. 
We set the little wheel of our personal faculties in the 
great stream of God's law, and all the omnipotence, all 
the omniscience of Almighty justice, holiness, and love 
come and turn our humble mill day and night, and grind 
for us. It is vain for wickedness to sit up late, to rise 
early, to eat the bread of carefulness, while God giveth 
to those that love him, even in their sleep. 



IDEALIZING FORCES. 



We all need something to idealize and beautify our 
life. Science, literature, art, music, all work that way, 
this for one, that for another. Poetry is a very common 
idealizer. The affections are a strong and beautiful 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 393 

power of this sort ; they come into the rich man's palace 
and the poor man's cottage, and they cheer him for his 
toil, and bless him at all times of his life. But the most 
powerful of all these idealizing forces, and the most beau- 
tiful too, is religion in the soul of man ; for when science 
has lost its charm, when music ceases to fascinate, when 
poetry stirs us no longer, when the objects of affection 
have passed away, and our eye sees them not, and even 
in the darkness our hands grasp not their well-beloved 
forms, — still the heart and flesh cry out for the living 
and most high God, and still that Infinite God comes 
down, our everlasting light and our glory 



In his prayer, a man enters into communion with him- 
self, talks with his higher self to know what he ought to 
do, and with his lower self to understand what he is. 



THE WORLD AS SEEN BY THE LIGHT OF RELIGION. 

To my religious eye, even if uncultivated by science, 
the world is the theatre of God's presence. I feel the 
Father. I see the beauty of his thought in the morning 
red, in the mists that fill up the valleys, in the corn 
which waves in the summer wind, in the billows which 
dash their broken beauty on every shore, in the stars 
which look down on the mists of the valley, on fields that 
wave with corn, on the billows that dash their broken 
beauty on the shore. I see in the moon — filling her 
horns with loveliness, pouring out such a tide of beauty 
as makes the farmer's barn seem almost a palace of en- 
chantment — the thought of God, which is radiating its 
silver sheen over all the world, and changing it to a won- 



394 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

drous beauty. Nature then seems nearer to me, a thou- 
sand times more beautiful, when I regard it as the work 
of God, even if I look with my eye all uncultivated with 
science, or do not understand the wonders that I see. 

But when science comes also, with the light of reli- 
gion, to expound the world, and I see the laws of inor- 
ganic matter, of mineral, vegetable, animal, human life, 
when I see that these laws are but the constant modes 
of operation of the Infinite God, his mind telegraphing to 
us in the material world, when I understand the wonder- 
ful hieroglyphics which he has writ, — then how differ- 
ent is the world ! What was before only a seed-field 
to feed my body, or only a workshop for my hand, is now 
a cabinet, a university full of the beauty of thought. 
The beauty of nature then is not mere beauty of form, 
and outline, and color ; it is the beauty of law, of wis- 
dom, the contrivance of means for an end ; finite means 
for an infinite end. It is the beauty of love, the infinite 
goodness pouring itself out through nature, and supply- 
ing the sparrow that falls, and the human race which is 
proudly marching on to its brave development. Yes, 
then the whole universe seems to my eye but as* one 
vast flower which blooms of God, and is fragrant with 
his never-ending love. Then every anemone beneath my 
foot, and every star above my head, runs over with the 
glorious thought of God which fills up my soul ; and the 
universe, which was just now only a workshop for my 
hand, and then a curious problem for my head, is now a 
vast temple for my spirit; and science also is a psalm 
and a prayer. 

The aspect of individual human life is changed yet 
more. I see that it is a part of God's providence. My 
life seems not now so poor and insignificant as it did be- 
fore. It is a part of the infinite world of God, a needful 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 395 

part, an indispensable part ; and worthy of God to cre- 
ate, to provide for, and to bless. Without religion, with- 
out the worship of the Infinite God, I feel myself but as 
one sand on the shore of time ; I am so little, that I may 
be lost in a world so large and so complicated. In the 
jostle of the universe, what will become of me, say I, a 
single atom of soul, a little monad of spirit ? What will 
become of me in a universe of worlds? I am too 
insignificant to be thought of. Then I ask, what shall 
become of me when I cannot care for myself? Who 
shall see that I am not lost and blown off forever ? But 
when I know of the infinity of God, and the relation that 
he sustains to the world of matter and the world of man, 
then I know that his providence comes down to me, that 
infinite power embraces me, that infinite wisdom watches 
over me, that infinite justice upholds me, and the love 
of the Father folds me in his infinite bosom, and I cannot 
be lost. I know that I have a right, an unalienable right, 
to the protection and the blessedness of the Infinite God ; 
and though mortal fathers neglect me, and mortal moth- 
ers drop me from their bosom, the Infinite Mother will 
hold me in her arms of blessedness and beauty forever 
and forever. 

Then the success of life is twofold more successful. 
Wealth, riches, fame, power of mind, genius, the achieve- 
ments of a grand life, — these I should look on as not 
only good for their own sake, but as pins in the wall 
whereby my human vine is to climb up to higher 
growth, and bear greater clusters, rich with the wine of 
mortal life, not for me only, but for all mankind ; for I 
see then that every excellence of Confucius, of Zoroas- 
ter, of Moses, of Jesus, of John, and James, and Bridget, 
and Michael, is not only a blessing for each of these 
persons, to go on for ever enlarging in worlds beyond 



396 MAN IN HIS EELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

the torob, but is a blessing that spreads on earth, 
" spreads undivided, operates unspent/' and ere long 
shall be communicated to every mortal child that lives. 

Then the defeats of life, the sad privations of the world, 
poverty, shame, sickness, death, the loss of the heart's 
fondest hope, the breaking of the pillars that we leaned 
upon for support, — all that is little ; the good God fore- 
knew it, provided for it all, and will round it all at last 
into a globe of infinite satisfaction. In my youth, the 
merely mortal passions and affections put round me a 
globe of glories, and painted thereon my boyish dreams, 
the fairest things I knew. How gay they looked in the 
early morning of mortal life ! But experience comes 
and shatters my globe that hedged me in from the uni- 
verse, and my morning dreams lie in a ruin at my feet. 
But the breaking of the glass that environed me, the 
shattering of my dreamy prophecy, that introduced me 
to the heavens, and over me are the perennial stars 
which never veil their face, but shine forever from 
glory to glory. I have changed the glass figure, and 
have a star that never sets. 

We sigh over the ruins of defeated mortal hopes, where 
a human soul went through into eternity. There, with 
many a tear-drop, we build us a monument, seeking with 
marble to honor the mortal flesh, so dear to our arms 
once, and our hearts too. But Religion builds there her 
arch of triumph, and looks onward to the unfading glory, 
the unfading promise, unfading growth of what was here, 
which is now immortal and divine beyond. Over the 
waste places of the earth, Faith in God plants her gar- 
den of Eden, where the tree of knowledge is fairer than 
the bud of hope we bore in our bosom, where no angel 
with two-edged sword fends us off from the tree of life. 
I know of no sorrow which religion cannot assuage, — 



MAN IN HIS KELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 397 

the sorrow for those that die, and the keener, more bit- 
ter, biting sorrow for those that do not die. Religion is 
our arm against fate ; nay, there is no fate, when armed 
with that enchanted shield. It is all providence, fatherly 
providence, motherly love. Human Nature will weep 
her tears, but they will be blessed tears when they are 
shed, when you know that God is all in all, and no little 
soul is ever lost ; that God takes the little tear-drop, and 
lays it by, and what was bitter weeping once shall be a 
jewel on our forehead forever and forever. 

Have you been wicked ; have you wasted days, and 
wrought guilty deeds in life ; do the sins of passion cry 
out against you, or, still worse, and still commoner in 
New England, the sins of calculation, — this is the sad- 
dest torture of the mortal heart. If I have wounded my 
own flesh or my own soul, it is a torture ; but if I have 
wounded another's flesh or another's soul, the torture is 
bitterer still. But even here religion is comfort. The sin 
was partly a mistake, grievously to be answered for, no 
doubt, still not eternal ; and out of dungeons of crime, 
or from scaffolds of wickedness, shall souls go up to God 
unblemished and made pure. It cannot be that the In- 
finite God will suffer a pirate, an assassin, a malicious 
murderer, or even the kidnapper that haunts our streets, 
monster though he be, to rot in his ruin. Oh, no ! He 
made all these for righteousness, and even in their sin- 
polluted souls there is a germ that may lift the spirit up 
at length to piety and philanthropy, to love, and the 
blessedness of heaven. 



398 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

REVIVALS OF RELIGION. 

Extraordinary efforts have recently been made in 
this town and neighborhood to produce what is called a 
" Revival of Religion." These efforts have been followed 
by certain results, and many more are to follow, some 
good, some ill. Let us look at the matter with the care- 
ful thought which its importance demands. 

The religious faculty is the strongest of all our spirit- 
ual powers, as indeed it must needs be, considering the 
vast function it has both here and hereafter ; and hence 
the men of great religious genius who help develop such 
sentiments and ideas as the coming age requires, always 
take the strongest hold on the world, controlling the 
widest multitudes for the longest time, and receiving the 
most lasting gratitude of mankind. Witness the influ- 
ence of Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, and the ado- 
ration paid to these four men to-day, — for each is some- 
where worshipped by millions as a God. But none of the 
high spiritual powers is so easily excited as the religious, 
and hence millions of men who have not much intellect- 
ual development, and who have little moral or affectional 
culture even, have yet a large activity of some of the 
humble religious faculties, and so are controlled by the 
devout disposition. It is not difficult to find thousands 
of men in New England who cannot be stirred to any 
intellectual curiosity, nor roused to righteous lives, nor 
interested in any broad scheme of human benevolence, 
who will yet kneel and pray words, and join churches, 
and who would even bear tortures under the excitement 
of the devout feeling. Nay, men with little mind, with un- 
developed conscience, with cold hearts, — ignorant men, 
low men, cruel men, — can yet excite the religious feel- 
ings of multitudes, leading them just where they choose. 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 399 

Ancient history is full of examples, whereof modern his- 
tory has no lack. In our own land, look at Joseph Smith 
and Brigham Young, — men of small talents, with no 
progressive ideas, men of low, malignant, and licentious 
character; and yet they seize the religious affections of 
thousands of men, and lead them just where they will. 
Other examples could be found, of lesser magnitude and 
humbler mark, much nearer home. 

These things being so, it is to be expected that the 
religious faculty should make greater mistakes in its pro- 
gressive development than any other. It is the big boy 
that falls heaviest to the ground, and perhaps bruises his 
limbs the worst. The follies of human science, taught 
in the name of human reason, are nothing compared to 
the follies of human religion taught in the name of mirac- 
ulous revelation from Gocl. Science never taught any 
thing so ghastly as the Calvinistic idea of Deity. The 
evils which come from false philosophy and bad forms of 
government are trifling to the hardships which come 
from a false form of religion, — from false ideas about 
Gocl, about man, and the relation be.tween them. Look 
at Italy and Spain to-day ! — six and twenty millions of 
people crushed to the ground by a false religious idea, 
which in one place a king, in the other a pope, forces 
into the people's throat with his cannon-shot and bayo- 
nets ! 

Of the five great world sects, the Brahmins, the Jews, 
the Buddhists, the Christians, and the Mohammedans, 
none started with such humane ideas, with such pious 
moral feelings in its originators, none had such a mag- 
nificent character in its founder, as the Christian sect, 
but no one has taught such absurd doctrines, none has 
practised such wanton and monstrous cruelty, and I 



400 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS*. 

think there is none at the present day in which so great 
fraud is imposed upon the people by the priesthood. 

This religious feeling being so mighty, so easily ex- 
cited, and so powerful for good or for ill, it will be at 
once seen that if any man can arouse it thoroughly, and 
guide it aright, furnishing true ideas of religion, and 
thereby directing men to the natural work of life, doing 
common things in such sort that they shall grow up to 
noble characters, — he will do the very greatest spirit- 
ual service that one man can perform for another, or his 
race, because to his reformation there must be no end ; 
for the subjective feeling and abstract thought of that 
single man will come out in the concrete, objective life 
of individuals, families, societies, nations, state and 
church, and spread all round the world, and end only 
with the world's termination. Accordingly you find as 
a fact that all the great progressive movements of man- 
kind begin in a revival of religion ; that is, in the quick- 
ening of that faculty which joins man to Infinite God. 
So to achieve any great work I always appeal to this 
faculty. That once started, then I have got a great gen- 
eral power, which can be turned in any one of a thou- 
sand beneficent directions. 

Amongst all the foremost nations of the world, great 
respect is felt for the name " Christianity ; " but the 
word has two quite different and antagonistic meanings. 
Sometimes it stands for that form of religion which con- 
sists in piety, the love of God, and morality, the keeping 
of those laws which God writes on matter and in spirit ; 
and then it is a Bethlehem star, which goes before wise 
men and men of genius, alluring multitudes of hopeful 
souls to new triumphs, to which mankind is to march 
forward and make certain. But commonly it means only 
a compliance with the popular theology, and a profession 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 401 

of belief in certain doctrines, some of which are utterly 
false and abominable, and the practice of certain forms, 
which once represented the religious life of earnest men, 
whose footsteps shook the world, but which have now 
only traditional meaning, and represent no life at all, 
In this latter case, the word u Christianity " is not a 
Bethlehem star, going before wise men, and guiding 
hopeful nations ; it is only a street-lamp at the door of a 
common tavern, fed with train oil, paid for at the town's 
expense, and daily trimmed and lit by a dirty man in a 
greasy frock, who does that work because thereby he 
makes the easiest and most respectable living. The 
first of these two things I will call the " Christian Re- 
ligion," because I believe Jesus of Nazareth meant this, 
and this only, when he said, " Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and 
with all thy mind, and thy neighbor as thyself." The 
other I shall call the " Christian Formality/ 7 not because 
it was taught by Jesus, for it was not, but because it is 
specially and peculiarly appropriate to the sect called 
by his name. 

Now, which of these two ideas is sought to be built up 
by revivals, and the results which flow from them ? I 
am sorry to say, that, so far as my observation has ex- 
tended, these efforts seem designed to build up what I 
have termed " Christian Formality," rather than "Chris- 
tian Religion." The operators in these revivals teach 
that if the most pious and moral man in the town does 
not accept the popular theology for his creed, and ob- 
serve the popular ritual of their sect, then he needs con- 
version just as much as the most abandoned profligate 
in a brothel or a jail ; that if such a man dies without 
accepting the u Christian Formality," God will plunge 
him into everlasting damnation, and keep him there for- 

26 



402 MAN IN HIS EELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

ever, and will take exquisite pleasure in watching the 
never-ending agonies of his child. It is never taught 
that piety and morality will save a man from the wrath 
of God ; they may be of service in this life, but are good 
for nothing for the life to come. 

To secure this end, the salvation of the soul from the 
wrath of God, powerful ministers, specially trained for 
the work of getting up revivals, hold protracted meet- 
ings for prayer and preaching, day after day, and week 
after week, holding several meetings each day. In these 
assemblies there is no discussion of any thing; a few 
speakers have it all their own way, and they appeal to 
the fears of their hearers, — the fear of death, and the 
fear of damnation after death. The sinfulness of man is 
dwelt upon in the most extravagant manner. It is not 
sin in the concrete — drunkenness, lying, licentiousness, 
covetousness, kidnapping, dealing in coolies, buying and 
selling slaves, perhaps your own children — that is de- 
nounced ; it is sin in the abstract, sin born in us, and 
not to be got rid of save by miraculous help. Man is 
represented as a poor, feeble, helpless worm of the dust, 
but, alas ! a worm that never dies. The preacher dwells 
on his lost state by nature, and his inability to help him- 
self. Then he speaks of God, and takes all the awful 
passages out of the Old Testament and the New which 
tell of the wrath of God, and eternal damnation, and 
picture the torments of hell. He makes the hearer look 
down and see millions after millions of men in the worm- 
heap of hell, writhing as the fire blazes up from beneath, 
while the devil stirs it, and then bids him look up to the 
calm, peaceful, and beautiful heaven ; and then tells of 
the mercy of God in sending his only-begotten Son to 
save mankind, and how easily salvation is to be secured ; 
— the man is only to renounce his natural, " carnal rea- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 403 

son," and believe every thing in the Bible (or what is 
more, every thing he says is in the Bible) ; he is to be 
convinced that his nature is good for nothing, and go 
to Christ, and rely upon his merits to save him. Pas- 
sages are read from the Bible of the most appalling char- 
acter, and when men shudder with horror, the preacher 
says, " These are not the words of man, they are the 
words of God ; " and the audience shivers all over with 
the thought. Then dreadful hymns are sung, and the 
tones of the organ fall upon the congregation like the 
world's wail over its own slaughter and ruin. Then 
come descriptions of heaven, and the joy of the blessed ; 
and the preacher tells of the mother in the New Jerusa- 
lem looking over the battlements and down into the 
ditch of hell, where she sees her profligate son writhing 
in the beginning of an agony that is to last forever, and 
then striking her golden harp anew, and saying, " The 
Lord God omnipotent reigneth ; blessed be the name of 
the Lord." The whole is mixed with prayers of the 
most extravagant character. You are told that now is 
the only time, this the only way. Then come individual 
conversation, coaxing, entreating, threatening, wheed- 
ling. Skilful women slide into the confidence of men, 
and ask them to save their souls ; shrewd men entreat 
women, like Mary of old, to " ponder these things in 
their hearts/ 7 and flee from the wrath to come ; and the 
minister, in a voice of thunder, tells his hearers, "He 
that believes and is baptized shall be saved ; he that 
believeth not shall be damned." 

You see the effect of this. Remember how easy it is 
under any circumstances to excite the religious feelings. 
Remember how strong is marvellousness in most men, 
how easily reverence is stirred in any generous nature, 
how terrible and agonizing is the power of fear, and how 



404 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

readily an excited crowd believe any thing told them by 
a famous and powerful speaker, who horrifies and palsies 
them with fear, electrifies them with hope, prostrates 
their reason, all their higher faculties, — and you need 
not be astonished that many persons are brought over 
to the preacher's will, and, in a moment of delirious 
agony, believe, as they are bid, that they are the greatest 
of sinners, that all their works are wickedness, and that 
God is the dreadful monster they are told of, ready to 
tread them down into bottomless torment. 

Now and then a good effect is produced. Hard, cold 
men, given to the lusts that war against the soul, are 
sometimes scared into the sober paths of duty, or frivo- 
lous women, consumed by worldliness and vanity, and 
walk therein the rest of their mortal lives. But com- 
monly the case is far different. Many thoughtful and 
moral men are disgusted with this folly and rant, and 
turn with contempt from every thing that bears the 
name of religion, and the most painful forms of infidelity 
and atheism are sure to come, — a lack of confidence 
in any higher law, in a creating Cause and preserving 
Providence that guides the world, a doubt that it is well 
to follow truth, and not a popular lie. Many who are 
converted in such haste, fall off again ere , long, and 
return to their actual wickedness, — " and the last state 
of such men is worse than the first." Some ten years 
ago, there came to a certain country town a famous re- 
vivalist, and forty-five men and women were converted ; 
within six months afterwards, the church cast them all 
out again, every man, every woman. While in those 
who remain steadfast, how much is there of bigotry, and 
a self-satisfied and selfish spirit ! nay, worse still, — a 
hatred towards all who differ from them. Nor is that 
all. What terrible worldliness and inhumanity ride on 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 405 

the same saddle with the most zealous Christian formal- 
ity, — Christ on the pommel, the devil on the pillion, 
each one rein, each one spur ! 

This form of religion rebukes the vices of passion, and 
therein it does well, and I am not sorry that these vices, 
which cannot be reached by the voice of entreaty, 
" charm we never so wisely," can yet, by this iron knout 
of fear, be scourged into subjection. But, alas ! worse 
vices — the lust of money, of power, of distinction, the 
vices of old men, men of hard heads and stony hearts, 
spiritual pride, self-conceit, arrogance, bigotry, hate — 
it leaves in full strength. 

While these revivals go on, what a lesson there is for 
you and me ! What zeal, what self-denial have our 
brothers shown for the highest they know ! If we have 
juster ideas of man, know his nobler character and cor- 
responding destination ; if we know that the Infinite 
God, who loves all the things he has made, suffers no 
sparrow to fall to the ground without the benediction of 
his providence, and will still less suffer a human soul to 
fall to final ruin ; if we know that religion is the natural 
piety of the heart, and morality the normal exercise of 
all the powers of man ; if we know that salvation, here 
and hereafter, is noble character, the effort for it, the 
longing after it, the prayer, even, that we may long for 
it, — what a noble work is demanded of you and me ! 
If we have set our eyes on that religion which human 
nature demands, then it ought to appear in our superior 
excellence of character. We ought to be better citi- 
zens, patriots, husbands, wives, parents, children, guard- 
ians, friends. We ought to educate our children to a 
more religious manhood, and ourselves be more honest 
in our work and trade, and kinder and more charitable 



406 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

to all. If grand ideas and great sentiments lodge with 
me at night, 

" Next day I cannot rest 
A silent witness of the headlong rage 
And heedless folly by which thousands die, 
Bone of my bone and kindred flesh with mine. ,, 

These things being so, the age asks two things of you 
and me. One is criticism, — that we tell the actual 
wrong, and the consequences thereof, and then tell the 
ideal right, and what will come of that. That is the 
first thing. The next is, creation, — example ; that our 
character be a new gospel, which shall stir the innermost 
heart ; our life a Sermon on the Mount, or a sermon in 
the street, or a sermon in the kitchen, for which men, 
learning to comprehend, shall thank God and take cour- 
age, and grow strong for many a day. That is slow 
work. It makes no noise ; it will not get into the news- 
papers ; men will not ring bells and say, " Behold ! twenty 
dipped last Sunday, and forty sprinkled to-day, sixty 
added to the church ; " — but unpretendingly the black- 
smith hammers his iron all the week, his very anvil 
made an altar whereat he serves God; noiselessly the 
mother goes before her little ones, walking in piety and 
morality, and " her children will rise up and call her 
blessed ; v honestly the trader buys, honestly sells ; 
manly men look after the sick, the drunken, the crazy, 
the poor ; with charitable justice they remove the causes 
of poverty and crime, and in brotherly love lift up the 
fallen, and save such as are ready to perish ; they reform 
the drunkard, they liberate the slave ; the savage wil- 
derness bows before them and disappears, with its hide- 
ous, howling beasts of prey ; behind them laughs the 
human garden, wherein all the virtues bloom ; — and 
" By their fruits ye shall know them ! " 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 407 

SUPERFICIAL RELIGION. 

It is to me one of the most pitiful of sights to see 
men and women whipped into religion by misfortune, as 
idle boys of old time were whipped into their lessons, 
and as lazy men are scourged by poverty to manly in- 
dustry and work. These persons endure for a time, but 
when money comes back, when new friends fill the ach- 
ing void which old ones had left, the new religion is 
withered and dried up, because there was no deepness 
of earth. So Jonah's gourd sprang up in a single night, 
to shelter the prophet's head, but the moruing sunbeam 
looked on it, and it melted down and was gone. Such 
persons set up religion in the day of their distress, as a 
man holds an umbrella over his head in a summer show- 
er, but the storm passes by, and religion is cast aside as 
the umbrella, to lie with rubbish in a corner till the next 
storm comes, when it will be taken up again to shelter 
their heads, but poor and old, and dingy and rent, worth- 
less as a shelter, and contemptible as an ornament. 
There are some homely lines which well describe the 
consciousness of such men: 

" The Lord and the doctor we alike adore 
Just on the brink of danger, not before ; 
When the danger is past, both alike are requited, — 
The Lord is forgotten, and the doctor slighted." 

But with other persons, with great depth of soul, the 
occasion only is transient ; the religion it wakens lasts 
forever, and bears fruit continually. Now and then 
you see this in a nation, which persecution or war 
scourges into religion. It was so with the Hebrews, so 
with the founders of New England. Have you never 
seen men and women whom some disaster drove to a 
great act of prayer, and by and by the disaster was for- 



408 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

got, but the sweetness of religion remained and warmed 
their soul ? So have I seen a storm in latter spring ; 
and all was black, save where the lightning tore the 
cloud with thundering rent. The winds blew and the 
rains fell, as though heaven had opened its windows. 
What a devastation there was ! Not a spider's web that 
was out of doors escaped the storm, which tore up even 
the strong-branched oak. But ere long the lightning 
had gone by, the thunder was spent and silent, the rain 
was over, the western wind came up with its sweet 
breath, the clouds were chased away, and the retreating 
storm threw a scarf of rainbows over her fair shoulders 
and resplendent neck, and looked back and smiled, and 
so withdrew and passed out of sight. But for weeks 
long the fields held up their hands full of ambrosial flow- 
ers, and all the summer through the grass was greener, 
the brooks were fuller, and the trees cast a more umbra- 
geous shade, because that storm passed by, — though all 
the rest of earth had long ago forgot the storm, its rain- 
bows, and its rain. 



POPULAR PREACHING. 



What sort of preaching do men demand in the popu- 
lar churches ? It is not all moral and religious truth that 
they want ; it is only the Scriptural portions, and you 
must keep the Scripture mistakes as well. It must be 
only Protestant truth ; only the Unitarian, or Calvinistic, 
or Methodist, or Baptist. So you see how the truth gets 
winnowed away, till it is a very little thing. Nor is this 
the worst. The minister is not to preach all of religion ; 
not all of the little which he needs must know j only so 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 409 

much as is acceptable. He must not weary the people ; 
must not demand a deep piety of hard and worldly men, 
nor of frivolous dandies. No ; it is called sentimentalism, 
it is moonshine. He must talk about faith in God. It 
must not be faith in the Almighty God present here in 
Boston, and everywhere else, with eyes of terrible love- 
liness that go through the world, having a wisdom and 
justice that overlooks nothing, a love and holiness which 
will leave no wrong unrighted at last. The faith he 
preaches must not mean that. It must be faith in the 
graven image that Nebuchadnezzar set up, with a head 
of gold, bosom of brass, and feet of clay. He must not 
preach a noble morality which does right always, without 
fear or favor. He must not touch a public or private 
sin, must not speak of intemperance to rum-sellers, nor 
must he rebuke licentiousness amongst debauchees, nor 
say a word against grinding the poor in the face of the 
grasping and avaricious millionnaire ; must not speak of 
frivolity before the ears polite of dandies of either sex. 
If he speak to slaveholders, of Baltimore or Boston, he 
must never speak of the sacredness of human liberty. 
He must make the Epistle to Philemon a new fugitive 
slave-law, sanctioned by Christianity, to return the poor 
outcast. He must not expose the sins of trade ; it would 
hurt men's feelings, drive them from one church, where 
they got nothing good, to another, where they could get 
nothing worse. 

Nor is this the worst. In selecting the minister, the 
inquiry is not, " Is the man able ? Has he talents large 
enough, and genius for religion ; education which makes 
him master of himself, and a leader of others, gathering 
the result of human toil for six thousand or sixty thou- 
sand years ? Has he the morality to make us better ? 
Has he piety, to charm us in our sorrows, to beguile us 



410 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

from our sins? Has he courage, justice, wisdom, love, 
and religion enough to make us better men, the church 
better, the city a better town, and the nation a better 
state ? " I do not believe these questions are ever asked 
by the controlling men of the prominent churches of this 
city. 

This is the question which is asked, though not admit- 
ted : " Is lie low enough for us, mean and servile to the 
right degree ? and can he obscure the light of Christian- 
ity so that it shall not dazzle our eyes, — which are keen- 
sighted as the eagle's to look at money and respectabil- 
ity, but which are stone-blind when we look at truth and 
righteousness and God ? " 

Christianity, my brothers, is free piety first of all, and 
free goodness next, and free thought. That is Christian- 
ity in the abstract. It is concretized and made human 
in the person of Jesus of Nazareth ; not the whole of it, 
but as much as we are likely to understand. But is 
that abstract Christianity the ideal of the churches of 
Boston ? Is Jesus Christ the ideal of Christians which 
they look to see realized ? Only the idol ; the substitute 
for life, not the stimulus thereto. In the ideal of a 
church, men go thither to become better. Is that the 
popular motive for church-going ? No ! The Christian- 
ity of this city is mainly a pretence. Do you believe 
the mass of the people wish Christianity preached in 
the hundred churches of this city, to have actual wrong 
preached down, and ideal right preached up ; that they 
would honor the man who would dare to preach thus ? 
As they honored Jesus, with a crown of thorns and a 
cross. " Hail, preacher of Christianity ! " would sound 
as well in Boston as " Hail, King of the Jews ! " sounded 
in Jerusalem. 

In the midst of this departure from the ideal, and set- 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 411 

ting up an idol in its place, there is something for you 
and me to do, — and that is to set the Christian's ideal 
plainly before us, to look on it often in our prayers, 
though with eyes streaming with penitence, to measure 
our thoughts, words, and feelings, and see that the faith 
that is in us be worthy of a Christian man. 



THEMES FIT FOB SUNDAY'S PREACHING. 

Sunday before last I spoke of the Prospect of Demo- 
cratic Institutions in America. It was near the anniver- 
sary of Washington's birth, and the occasion of the day 
and the peril of the times alike demanded some mention 
of that subject. Last Sunday I said something of the re- 
sult of the most democratic institutions in the world, as it 
appears in the Material Condition of the People of Mas- 
sachusetts, — for the significance of these institutions ap- 
pears in the numbers of people, their property, health, 
education, and their means for preserving their persons 
and their property. 

External subjects were both of these, yet of great im- 
portance to us all. Some men think them not quite fit 
for Sunday's preaching. " One is politics," say they, " the 
other mere economy ; neither is better than ciphering." 
No doubt of it. But there must be foundations to the 
house, outer walls, and roof, not less than kitchen, parlor, 
chambers, and the like, with their several furniture. 
Masons must do their rough, laborious work before the 
upholsterer can be called in. Let no man despise the 
great thick walls of granite laid under-ground, nor the 
piles of wood they sometimes rest on, driven ten or twen- 
ty yards into the earth. The rude bricks piled on the 
foundation-stones are likewise indispensable ; so also the 



412 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

slate-stones on the roof where-under all the joys of the 
family are snugly nested. Without the political institu- 
tions of a democracy, the great general welfare of Mas- 
sachusetts would not be possible ; and without that gen- 
eral welfare, represented by peace, plenty, health, means 
of education, power to protect property and person, why, 
the common religion would be quite other than it is now. 
If starving men pray, it is only for bread ; fulness is then 
counted the first virtue, and a dinner is imputed to a man 
for righteousness. Men under tyrannies either crouch 
down into superstition, or, if too noble for that disgrace- 
ful decay, they seek first of all to punish the crimes of 
state which keep them down. That is not first which is 
spiritual ; it is the flower that comes after the root, and 
out of the bud, not before it. 



Men say you should not think of the week on Sunday, 
nor of your business in your devotion, nor bring your 
world into your church. But this is just what I would 
do, — remember the week in my Sabbath, my business in 
my prayer, the world in my church. I would do this 
that all these things might be sanctified. In your high- 
est state, it is always well to remember your lowest, and 
so get lifted up. 



the power of religion. 



In the market, the reading-room, the editor's office, 
the court-house, or the senate-house, Religion seems a 
very small power, which affects nobody much. Young 
men graduating at college say they will be lawyers, or 
doctors, or merchants, and lay hold on some influence 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 413 

which moves men ; religion they will not touch, it not 
moving men. It is left out of the account of public 
powers by the political economist, and statesmen smile 
gravely when you speak of religion as one of the forces 
that sway the world, and think you are young. But 
when you come to look at the history of nations, — 
America, England, France, Germany, — you see that, 
after all, it is sentiments and ideas of religion which, in 
their silent or their stormy action, sway the nation and 
control the state ; and when you take into your account 
the whole life of the human race, when you look at such 
facts as Puritanism, Protestantism, Mahometanism, Chris- 
tianity, — then you see that all the great civilizations of 
the world have sprung out of religious feeling, have been 
shaped and controlled by religious thought. Men love to 
connect religion with the cardinal points of their life, 
with the birth of a baby, with the betrothal of a girl, 
with a marriage or a funeral. The finite hiuges on the 
infinite, and the little life of Oliver and Jane revolves 
round that point ; the large life of England and America 
turns on the same, and the world hinges on its conscious- 
ness of God. In the long warfare of the world, the saint 
conquers the warrior, and the prophet of religion tri- 
umphs over the statesman, though he have a kingdom at 
his back. Did not a carpenter's boy, born in Bethlehem, 
drive Jupiter Olympus out of the heathen world ? 



THE GREAT PECULIARITY OF CHRISTIANITY. 

The great peculiarity of Christianity is not recognized 
even now. The common notion of Christianity is that it 
is a positive command, and rests on the authority of one 
man, and not on the nature of God ; that Jesus was only 



414 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

a wiser Moses, who received the laws of God, and made 
new ones and added thereto. And so the common eccle- 
siastical mode of proving Christianity is by quoting texts. 
Men do not see that the New Testament contains things 
that establish unchristianity, sometimes put into the 
mouth of Christ himself. One of the most dreadful things 
in the world is tyranny ; but the worst tyranny can be 
.justified out of the commands of St. Paul, and it has been 
justified. The accidental things of the New Testament, 
which have no relation to Christianity, are thought to be 
of great importance. 

Christianity is not to rest on the authority of Jesus, 
but to become the great practice of absolute religion, 
and to carry us farther forward, and not to be restrained 
even by the limitations of Jesus himself, if he had such. 

Man is the highest work of God, Christianity the high- 
est revelation of God. Moses and Jesus were a partial 
revelation of God, for man is more than Moses and Jesus. 
Christianity is not more than human nature, but it is 
less ; it is only one side, but its glory is that it com- 
pletely represents and satisfies that side. The ethics of 
Christianity are not more than human nature. With the 
Hebrew ethics the appeal was made to authority ; with 
the Classic ethics the appeal was made to human history, 
to experience and man's sense of expediency ; but with 
the Christian ethics the standard is human nature, and 
the love of right, of truth, and of justice ; in one word, 
the love of man and the love of God ; and round these 
two foci, goodness and piety, hereafter the absolute reli- 
gion, in even balance, is to run and form its fair and har- 
monious ellipse of the perfect religion. The Christian 
man is to do right, not because Christ said so, but be- 
cause it is right ; not only the right which Christ com- 
manded, but all which he can learn. Pure, unsullied 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 415 

love is to be the highest passion of man. The God of 
Christianity is the God of love. Morality is to spring 
spontaneous and unbidden out of the human heart, free 
as reason, beautiful as truth. Here is Christianity ; not 
the Christianity of the past, nor of the present, of Catholic 
or of Protestant ; but the Christianity of man's heart, of 
man's nature, and God's nature, and with the glorious 
gospel of everlasting life ; and it seeks in man the stand- 
ard of right, absolute, perfect, and inflexible. It en- 
thrones Reason and Conscience as king and queen. Reli- 
gion, the royal child of this imperial pair, lays her hand 
on this harp of a thousand strings, and, tuning all to har- 
mony, wakes the human hymn of sweet accord which 
steals up to God, the prophetic chant of the nations as 
they march to their bright destination, seeking to enter 
into the kingdom of God, which has been the prophecy 
of the saint, and is to be the brightest achievement of 
mankind. As they go, they seem to sing, " Lift up your 
gates, for the King of Glory shall come in." Future 
ages speak to us and say, u Who is this King of Glory ? " 
Man, is the answer ; Man marching in his majesty, and 
going home to God. 

The Hebrew ethics are behind us ; and the heathen, 
with their anarchies, their despotisms, war, slavery, igno- 
rance, and want ; not unredeemed by the presence of 
earth's mighty men, — Moses, Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Soc- 
rates, and the rest. Around us lies the toilsome world, 
dimly enlightened from above ; our own transactions 
have dimmed the windows through which the light 
should come. Here the sons of men walk, some with 
prone faces, and some erect, their countenance unveiled, 
and future ages sparkling in their eye, and worshipping 
as they go the one dear God, who pities their errors, 
foreknows their wanderings, but with providential arm 



416 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

surrounds the sinner and the saint, and while he bears 
the innocent lamb, his right hand still leads back the 
wanderer, still blessing all as heretofore. 

Such is behind us, around us : but before us light 
dawns, and shines on pure fields and perfect, where 
Christianity, the inward thought, shall be the outward 
fact ; and Christian piety shall be the common sentiment ; 
not rare, but the sentiment of every day ; and where 
Christian virtues shall become Christian deeds ; and the 
ideal of Christian prayer become the actual, the daily 
Christian life, and men are friends of men, nations of na- 
tions, and all of us conjoined to God. 



MAN'S FUTURE CONTROLLED BY HIS PRESENT. 

It seems to me plain that our condition in the next life 
must be consequent on our character and conduct here. 
But our character and conduct depend on such a long 
series of circumstances, that it is not only difficult, but it 
is wholly impossible, that you and I can tell how much 
any man is to be blamed, how much any man is to be 
praised. I know how much I am to be blamed very 
often ; I do not know how much anybody else is. He 
will judge for himself perhaps ; the good God surely will. 
I know what actions and motives are noble ; I esteem 
men who do such actions, have such motives, and show 
a noble character. But to the eye that takes in the 
whole universe, the eternal as well as the present, things 
must have a very different look. How much of our char- 
acter depends on the physical constitution we are born 
with, the size and shape of the brain, the temperament ; 
how much on the circumstances of early life, parents and 
education ! Even the character of the church that a man 



MAN IN HIS KELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 417 

is bred up in determines whether he shall be a kidnap- 
per or a philanthropist, very often. How much depends 
on the temptations and opportunities of daily life ! I 
make no doubt there are bad men who have deserved a 
prison for their conduct on earth, who will yet rise in the 
kingdom of heaven, in God's sight less blameworthy than 
the judge who condemned them from the bench. God 
can understand these things, and must doubtless make 
allowances. I cannot suppose that He is to reward men 
for having had opportunities for development, and pun- 
ish others for not having had such opportunities. There- 
fore when we say that a man's condition in heaven must 
be controlled by his character, we go far into the re- 
cesses of our innermost being • I mean, it must be de- 
pendent on our fidelity to our nature here. 

I cannot think that death is a misfortune to any man. 
It must, it seems to me, be : a step forward, even for the 
worst man, whose life has been crooked from beginning 
to end, stained with crime all the way through. The 
good God will suffer no son of perdition to fall to the 
ground. In our justice there is more vengeance than 
love ; we want to smite down the man, because he has 
done us a wrong. But the Infinite God looks out for 
each offender, and while he takes care of the whole 
world, so that not an atom of flower-dust is lost, will take 
care of every individual soul. 

This doctrine of immortality is of priceless value as an 
encouragement for the individual and for mankind. The 
seed we sow in time comes up and blossoms in eternity. 
Then what a consolation it is to say, I know that charac- 
ter is its own reward. 

But how much suffering there is in this world for 
which man wants compensation, part of which he has not 
brought upon himself, part of which he has. The most 

27 



418 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

obvious justice shows that if a man has suffered wrong- 
fully, he ought to have some compensation in the next 
life ; a deeper justice shows that if he has sinned he 
ought to have a chance to retrieve his wrong. I expect 
to suffer in the next life, as in this, for every conscious 
wrong thing that I have done ; and I will lift up my soul 
and say, " Father in heaven, I thank thee for it. Even by 
suffering let me be made better ; let me step ever for- 
wards and upwards." But what a comfort and consola- 
tion there is in this. Our tears drop into an ocean that 
seems bitter ; they are changed into pearls, and we shall 
wear them round our forehead ; and the powers of our 
soul shall be enlarged, and I doubt not that ere we have 
been dead many years we shall have expanded into ex- 
cellence, intellectual, moral, affectional, and religious, 
which we dream not of here, in our highest conceptions. 
This strengthens us for every duty, prepares us for 
every trial and cross. 



man's eternity. 



Human machines for printing, weaving, and the like, 
wear out at last ; but the divine machine of man or man- 
kind never wears out, and as it goes on produces more 
and more perfect and lofty specimens the longer time it 
runs. If I know that I am to live forever, and to in- 
crease in quantity and quality of being continually, that 
it is so with every little baby that is born and dies to- 
day, with all mankind, — savage, civilized, enlightened, 
— how very trivial seem the disasters which befall me 
or mankind, especially if I know they have all been fore- 
seen and overruled for the ultimate good of every child 
that suffers ! I pray my foolish prayers to God ; — "0 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 419 

Father, give me riches, power, the praise of men to-day." 
" Dear child," says God, " I will not give you these 
things ; I will give yon more vast faculties, capable of 
infinite development, with all eternity for their growth, 
their use, and their enjoyment. Take these things, and 
be contented with nothing else." 

I am, let me suppose, a poor unfortunate mortal : noth- 
ing goes well with me ; I go ill with myself. I am 
driven about, doing much that I would not. But here 
within a life-sail of me is eternity. This grub of a body 
goes through its chrysalis of death, and the winged soul 
is borne to its appropriate place. It shall carry with it 
nothing of this earth, but only the result of my use of 
life ; and it shall make small odds to the infinite justice 
of the Father of us all, whether that faithfulness had a 
handful of brain more or less, or a handful of gold more 
or less, or of renown. 



THE TRANSCENDENT WORLD. 



Matter and spirit are the only two forms of existence 
that we directly know, the one by sensational observa- 
tion, the other by spiritual consciousness. If you and I 
were matter and nothing else, we should know nothing of 
spirit ; if spirit and no more, we should know nothing 
of matter ; but now we know both, because ourselves are 
both material and spiritual. But yet, as we are ooly 
matter and spirit, we know nothing directly of that tran- 
scendent world which is above matter and above spirit ; 
we know nothing of the details thereof, but we cannot 
suppose that God is limited to these two forms of exist- 
ence, matter and spirit; He must transcend both. There 
may be other worlds of existence as much superior to 



420 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

ours as the mind of Von Humboldt is superior to this 
drop of water. I make no doubt that there are such 
transcendent worlds, peopled with beings fitted to their 
sphere. I doubt not that departed spirits are in that 
world, with power, function, blessedness, as much supe- 
rior to those of Von Humboldt or Florence Nightingale, 
as their power, function, and enjoyment are superior to 
those of the dullest insect on this plant beneath my 
hand. I doubt not that by the facts of observation and 
consciousness God is manifest to beings in that world in 
a style of glory such as you and I can no more directly 
dream of than the little insects on this plant can dream 
of the reflective consciousness of philanthropic Miss 
Nightingale or philosophic Humboldt. But as directly 
I know nothing of that world by observation or con- 
sciousness, I do not meddle much therewith, and I never 
seek evidence of God therefrom. When we shall be 
turned into that world, it will be soon enough for you 
and me to attend to its duties ; but here I think we may 
be pardoned if in our sad days we cast longing looks up- 
wards and forwards towards that promised land which is 
our certain heritage ; and if women and men with whom 
the world has gone hard, do, in their gloominess, look 
forward to that, and long to be present in it, and count 
the present time to move slow, I find no fault with them. 
We all indulge in this feeling. What would become of 
us if there was not that certain and ideal world which 
we could flee unto when perplexed and cast down in 
this? 



SPIRITUAL RICHES. 



A man who has got rich suddenly thinks he is tall, 
when he is only high ; he thinks he has done his work, 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 421 

when he has only got his tools and his trade ; — for 
money, honor, power, are only what the lap stone and 
shoe-hammer and knife are to the shoemaker. The art 
to use these is only the trade, not the work ; means, not 
end. 

If you want to get rich, to get office, to get honor, 
America is the best country under the sun of God, and 
opportunities are plenty enough. But if you wish to 
seek for higher things you must go on your own feet, 
the pioneer even of yourself; and the good God who 
was with the slow tongue of Moses, and brought Israel 
out of Egypt, will go before you as a pillar of cloud in 
your prosperity, a pillar of fire in the day of trial, will 
lead you into the land of promise ; dry-shod you shall 
pass the Red Sea, and find angels' bread in the wilder- 
ness, and water in the rocks ; every mountain shall 
smoke with the presence of God, and glitter with the 
lightning of his commandments ; Jordan shall dry up 
before you, as your feet touch it ; and, bearing the ark 
of God's covenant in your hand, all the glories of the 
promised land shall open before you. 



SPIRITUAL ASSESSMENT. 



What if the assessors of this city, who take an in- 
ventory of our worldly property, could also take an 
inventory of the spiritual estates which men have ac- 
quired from the human nature born in them and the 
circumstances about them, and publish an annual book, 
rating men as they will stand in the kingdom of heaven. 
What a record that would be ! What odds in spiritual 
estates would you see ! What millionnaires of piety, 
what kings of nobleness, nay, what emperors, ruling 



422 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

whole realms of virtue, wisdom, justice, and love ; what 
paupers in excellence, yea, what slaves in respect to 
manhood, should we find ! 

But this is no fancy. There is an assessor who takes 
the inventory ; there is a book wherein it is all written 
down ; you and I and all other men have each a page 
in that vast book ; God only sees it. Every day we get 
income from our estate exactly in proportion to what 
we are worth, a daily dividend, the result of our action ; 
and it is all posted in the ledger of life, which is the 
record of our character. God is the Great Accountant, 
and the laws of matter and of mind are the book-keepers, 
that never err. 



TOLERATION. 

You and I talk of toleration ; but if a man has a name 
for God different from ours, we give him a bad name. 
But the great God has infinite toleration for all. The 
old Egyptian sculptured out an ugly sphinx, and knelt 
down and prayed before it; the Greek, out of Parian 
stone, carved a statue of Venus Aphrodite, or Phoebus 
Apollo, the God of the sun, and knelt down and wor- 
shipped it ; the Catholic carves a statue of the Virgin 
Mary, or paints it; and the cold Puritan, in his un- 
adorned meeting-house, with no sculpture and no pic- 
ture, folds his hands, and prays aloud to his dreadful 
God ; the Quaker, in his church, with no ornament, folds 
his hands, turns inwardly his eyes, and utters no word. 
But the same prayer from Egyptian, Grecian, Catholic, 
Puritan, Quaker, goes up to God, who is Father and 
Mother of all five, and blesses each alike. It is not the 
name which is of importance ; it is the thing. 



MAN IN HIS EELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 423 

THE ORTHODOX HEAVEN. 

I could not enjoy the popular notion of heaven, with 
nobody in it except good orthodox Christians. A few 
years ago a minister said that Dr. Channing undoubtedly 
went "the other way/' — never reached heaven. If I 
had been that orthodox minister, I could not have slept 
comfortably for a single night, until Doctor Channing had 
been carried up there ; nay, if I had gone there myself, 
with my orthodoxy in my head, and found that Doctor 
Channing was left out, I could not have taken any com- 
fort in heaven, till that one lost soul was restored. Who 
is there that, if he should go to heaven, and find that 
Cain had been cast out, and Iscariot left behind, and the 
Boston kidnapper's ugly face missing from that place, 
would not call the philanthropists together, and see if 
something could not be done to bring there the great 
murderer, the great betrayer, and those of our time who 
thirst and hunger for human souls ? Why, we could not 
sit down at the table of the Lamb in the Kingdom of 
God, if Cain had not a plate, and Iscariot a chair, and 
if there was not room for the kidnapper of Boston. 



THE FUNCTION OF PAIN. 

The fact that there is pain in the world of man, which, 
while it serves the race, has no compensating benefit 
for the sufferer here, is a clear indication that pain has 
another function for the part of man which is not ma- 
terial, but spiritual. It points to an hereafter, — and one 
for beasts, not less than man ; for as here on earth man's 
body seems to have been brought to its present condi- 
tion, and made the fitting habitation for a master mind 



424 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

by many developments through inferior beasts, which 
keep him company still and attend his march, so, I doubt 
not, it will be in that other world ; and you and I may 
think, like the Indian, that, 

" Admitted to that equal sky, 
Our faithful dog shall bear us company." 



THE SADNESS OP FUNERALS. 



A funeral in its common forms, with the common 
ideas connected therewith, has sometimes seemed to me 
to show the greatest want of faith in God. It is not 
taught in sermons in the churches, nor set forth in 
prayer and psalm at funerals, that death is a blessing to 
the dead, that the grave is only the golden gate of im- 
mortality, its iron side turned towards us, but its pearly, 
golden side turned the other way, only the gate which 
lets the mortal through. We bury our friends under 
cold clay, with the publication of our infidelity, when the 
soul of faith in God ought to shine out of our counte- 
nance, and beautify the cold body which lies there 
before us, whose soul has winged its way upwards to its 
Father. 



INFIDELS. 

You and I have been called infidels. We are so, tried 
by the common test. Our Christianity is not the com- 
mon form.. Our form of religion is another gospel ,* our 
God is not the jealous God who damns the sinner to 
eternal woe ; not a God who subjects the soul of man 
to a law of sin and death, but makes it free by the great 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 425 

law of his spirit. Yet we haye been charged with this 
infidelity. While we are thus different from other sects, 
I believe we have not been charged with doubting the 
infinity of God ; . never with a disbelief in the power of 
truth, justice, love, and holiness to regenerate your heart 
and mine, to regenerate and bless the world ; never 
even with the faintest doubt that God's purpose was a 
perfect purpose, his plan perfect, and the human means 
thereto were beautifully designed by infinite wisdom to 
accomplish his end. 



HEROISM OF THE SOUL. 



Everybody can understand the physical valor which 
confronts death and danger, and charges up to the can- 
non's mouth in battle ; but everybody cannot understand 
the heroism which says, " Please God, I will keep the in- 
tegrity of my conscience undefiled, though you tear my 
flesh with wild horses." When men do understand it, 
they pull down the monument of the soldier to build a 
chapel to the heroes of the soul, and melt up the insig- 
nia of crowned kings to get gold fine enough to write 
the name of some tent-maker or fisherman. At first 
men do not appreciate this heroism of the soul. If they 
did they would pluck the stars out of heaven to make a 
diadem to put on the hero's head. 



COMPENSATION. 



I know not how men without religion get along in the 
world. It must not only be hard, but hopeless. Contin- 
ually there are sorrows for which the earth has no rec- 



426 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

ompense. Here a man is sacrificed. The world gains, 
does it ? It is the man's loss. Arnold von Wiiikelreid 
takes a sheaf of Austrian spears in his bosoru, breaks 
thereby the Austrian ranks, the swift tide of freedom 
flows through, and. Switzerland is free. Winkelreid is 
dead, his fireside chair is empty, all night the dog howls 
for his master, the wife is a widow, his babes fatherless. 
What recompense is there on earth ? For Hebrew Je- 
sus, for Roman Regulus, for Athenian Socrates, the 
world has no compensation. Here is one born so that 
education is impossible ; want makes him a clown. This 
girl is the victim of circumstances ; the world's hardness 
makes her short life one long blush of infamy. The 
powers of human nature were born in her, she was 
made for heaven ; but the vices of society nipped them 
in the bud, and made her a harlot. Earth has no recom- 
pense. What compensation is there to the slave for his 
bondage ? to the patriot who dies, and sees Turkey, Ita- 
ly, Hungary, France, die with him ? Earth answers not. 
What compensation is there for the blind ? Earth has 
none to show. What for the deaf? The world gives 
no answer. What for the fool ? Wisdom knows it not. 
The compensation, the joy, for their discipline, must 
come in the eternal world. I know not how ; the fact I 
am sure of. That one and one make two is not clearer 
to me. I am not more certain of my own existence. It 
follows from God's infinity. 

God left us free a little, one hand winged with free- 
dom, the other bound by fate. But his infinite provi- 
dence, infinite love, must so overrule the world that no 
man shall suffer absolute ill. What is not compensated 
now, hereafter God himself will pay. Our next condi- 
tion must depend, not on our circumstances here, not on 
the accidental virtue or vice which these circumstances 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 427 

make, but on the use ourselves have made of our gift 
and our opportunity ; and though the little that we gain 
may be so little that men despise it and count it vile, 
God treasures it up, and will bless us for that. Few 
men know how much may be done in the midst of cir- 
cumstances that seem evil. We may make a minimum 
of sorrow out of a maximum of adverse conditions ; yea, 
we may get a maximum of human fidelity out of a mini- 
mum of opportunity and gift. It is an immense advan- 
take to know the soul's immortality, and be sure of eter- 
nal life ; to know the infinite perfection of God, and be 
certain that the Great Mother folds us in her arms and 
will bless us for ever. The greatest practical thing is 
to get the discipline out of the world, its joy and its sor- 
row. It is a hard world, is it ? One day we shall thank 
God for its hardness, and bless him for its sorrow. 



COMFORT IN RELIGION. 



Religion is to help us endure and suffer what cannot 
be avoided and overcome. It is an active force to ener- 
gize and harmonize all powers, making us aspire. But 
it is also a passive force, to tranquillize, to calm, to com- 
pose the consciousness of man, to give us peace, and 
rest, and beauty, and tranquillity. A form of religion 
which is only for activity is not adequate for any man 
during his whole life. 

There are dark, rainy days of life, when no man can 
work, days full of affliction, times of sickness, disappoint- 
ment, great sadness of heart. Then we want comfort, 
consolation, peace, and rest. Stout, vigorous, hearty, 
and in haste, I want a horse, and a swift one, to carry 



428 MAN IN HIS EELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

Hie up hill and down; but old, feeble, tired, spent, I 
want a staff to lean on, a pillow to sleep on. 

The old forms of religion had very little comfort for 
the old, the feeble, the sick, the disappointed, and the 
bereaved. I wonder not that there was in Rama a voice 
heard, lamentation and mourning, — Rachel weeping for 
her children, and refusing to be comforted. There was 
small comfort for her in the theology of those times. 
The old armies went forth to battle without doctor or 
surgeon, without lint or bandage, or ambulance. Jeho- 
vah, Baal, Jupiter, had priests by the hundred in their 
camp, never a doctor. It was very much so with the old 
forms of religion. They were for action, not for conso- 
lation. The Old Testament is a collection of brave 
books, the works of deep-hearted men, strong-minded 
men some of them, some full of beauty, others full of con- 
sciousness of right, all of them trembling before their 
God. Now and then there are words of comfort ; others 
scattered here and there into which we impart our own 
consolation. True, the Bible has no jeers for the unfor- 
tunate ; but it has small comfort for the poor, the decrepit, 
the sick, the disappointed, and the sinful ; it is a dreadful 
book for those, taken as a whole. The captive Jews 
hung their harps on the willows ; there was no consola- 
tion for them when they thought of Jerusalem trod un- 
der the Gentile's foot. The Old Testament is a sad book 
to die by. It might hold up the hands of strong Moses, 
fighting against Amalek ; but when you come to stand 
by the grave of wife or child, it is a hard book, and 
poor ; and when a people stood at the grave of their na- 
tion, no comfort sprung out of the ground ; it was Ra- 
chel mouruing for her children, and refusing to be com- 
forted, because they were not. The old forms of heathen 
religion were no better, most of them were far worse. 



MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 429 

True, immortality shone on the Grecian hills with a 
fairer light than of old lit rip Horeb and Lebanon and Zion ; 
but the classic forms of religion were very sad at the 
best for the sick, the disappointed, and the afflicted. Ju- 
piter, Apollo, Venus, Minerva, were gods that loved the 
conquerors, not the conquered ; one can get very little 
comfort from these worldly deities, that honor the suc- 
cessful, and such only. . 

But let me be sure of the infinite providence of God 
first, then of the immortality of the soul, and I can face 
any thing in the shape of sorrow, disappointment, sick- 
ness, death. I know it is for a little while, and now ; and 
everlastingly it is overruled by the infinite love of the 
great, dear Mother of the world. So I will be still. I 
can conceive of nothing which a man cannot bear with 
fortitude, if sure of these two things. 



THE HIGHEST JOY. 



I NEVER undervalue any form of normal joy. I rejoice 
in the humble pleasures of the insect, of the worm that 
eats my rosebuds in the spring before their opening 
hour. I like to see the happiness which spring awakens 
in the bosom of the frog and toad ; the joys of sheep and 
oxen are dear to me. I love the happiness of children, 
of the soft baby, rejoicing in its mother's arms, of the 
stammering little one, whose first word seems a Spartan 
achievement. I love to see the happiness of boys, with 
ball and sled and skate, of girls with hoop and doll and 
dainty joyous games ; to see the joys of men, rude men 
and poorly developed too, whose talk is of oxen and 
ships and shops and markets and dividends, — this unde- 
veloped clown of the country, joying in nothing but his 



430 MAN IN HIS RELIGIOUS ASPECTS. 

clover, this undeveloped clown of the city, joying in his 
cotton. I love to see the joys of successful enterprise ; 
I love the proud and brave delight of science, of letters, 
and artistic skill, of such as trace the way to every star, 
of such as unroll the wonders of the ancient scroll be- 
neath our feet, of such as disenchant the flesh of pain, or 
send the well-tended fire of heaven to extinguish the ac- 
cidental fires that men have left untended here on earth. 
I love the joys of men who unroll the mighty volume of 
human consciousness, and with metaphysical eye and 
Ariadne thread wind through this labyrinthine world of 
man. I love the joys of the historian, moralist, bard, of 
men in youth seeking the object of instinctive passion in 
blameless wedlock, of men seeking the objects of instinc-' 
tive affection, and finding themselves anew in the little 
immortals God drops into their arms. I value all these 
things ; yea, I bless in my morning and my midnight 
prayer the dear God who so plentifully spreads the table 
with such various food, for lofty and for little men. But 
I must not forbear to say that the joy of loving God 
alone surpasses all these joys, and hinders none, nay, 
helps all. 



THE END. 




■■'•■'■■.■•■.,■ 




:-.•.., '■■ ;:;:-'.»■.:'■':'. fl V.V"i#. '•!»■/«(* i/^i*.: 




mmMBxHRm 



